2023-05-08 11:05:09
At a time when art is increasingly reduced to a competition, sanctioned by sales records or views on YouTube and Instagram, it would be easy to line up figures to prove that Menahem Pressler, in the absence of equal in notoriety Horowitz and Rubinstein, had nevertheless marked its time. The Beaux Arts Trio, which he founded in 1955, is still considered the best in the history of recorded music, ahead of the famous Cortot-Thibaud-Casals, Istomin-Stern-Rose and Rubinstein-Heifetz-Feuermann. And that as much for its longevity – 6,000 concerts on the planet, in fifty-three years! – than for the ability of its members to step aside in order to offer the most unified readings of the masterpieces of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. When the trio ceased to exist, Pressler began a career as a soloist at the age of 85 and made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at 90, which is also not common. But nothing would be more misleading than to reduce this marvelous musician to exploits, as his playing reflected a poetic sensitivity, a youthful purity, an elegance of heart from another age.
Two years following a recital at the Cité de la Musique, which would be followed by invitations to perform with the Orchester de Paris at Pleyel, Pressler told Release his childhood in Magdeburg, Germany, where he was born to parents from Poland and Galicia. The first persecutions once morest the Jews, his dismissal from school and the “Night of Broken Glass”, during which his father’s tailor shop had been vandalized. The series of successive miracles – the son of the SA pharmacist who stood in the way of people not going up to kill them, the border guard who closed his eyes – having enabled his family to escape and reach the port of Haifa , in Mandatory Palestine. His physical fragility, no doubt due to having been torn from his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, all deported and exterminated in the death camps.
mischievous smile
But also his apprenticeship with Eliyahu Rudiakow and Leo Kestenberg, who had been a pupil of Busoni. The meeting with Paul Loyonnet, invited to play with the Israel Philharmonic and who introduced him to Debussy. The generosity of Karel Salomon, director of Israeli radio, who had helped him to reach New York where he immediately seduced Henry E. Steinway in person. Then his triumph at the Debussy competition in San Francisco, his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Ormandy, before being called back to participate in the war of independence of the State of Israel. in 1948. You might listen to him talk for hours regarding Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Alma Mahler, Munch and Toscanini, whom he had known, such as his work as a teacher at the University of Bloomington, in the Indiana, he was so direct and had retained the mischievous smile of the children. If his game was no longer technically infallible, we were delighted to listen to his new albums for the French label La Dolce Volta and to go see him in concert. Ten years ago, although still not wearing glasses, he had to retake his driver’s license. His daughter, he confided with a hearty laugh, had said to him: “I think they forgot you up there!” These mysterious inhabitants of the heavens finally called him back on Saturday.
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