“Lately, we’ve seen a speedy enlargement not solely of the viewers for chamber music, however of that viewers’s sophistication and its consciousness that the style additionally consists of sonatas, piano trios, small vocal ensembles, quintets, sextets and certainly all method of mixtures,” John Rockwell of The Instances wrote in 1979. “And for that enlargement of consciousness, we are able to partly thank the Beaux Arts Trio.”
In 2008, when the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded after 53 years, Mr. Pressler was nonetheless its anchor, the final surviving authentic member. He was 84, however he continued performing as a soloist and with ensembles. He additionally continued educating at Indiana College, the place he held the Charles H. Webb chair in Music.
Menahem Pressler was born in Magdeburg, Germany, on Dec. 16, 1923, 153 years after what is mostly accepted as Beethoven’s birthday. Certainly one of three kids of Moshe and Judith (Zavderer) Pressler, he started enjoying the piano at 6 and was an completed performer as a young person, taught secretly by a church organist after Hitler’s persecution of the Jews rose to a fever pitch.
He recalled Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide assault on Jewish properties, companies and synagogues.
“The thugs broke into our household store in Magdeburg — a gentleman’s outfitters,” Mr. Pressler advised The Guardian in 2008. His English nonetheless accented with the German of his childhood, he slipped into the current tense as vivid recollections returned: “We’re hiding in the home, hoping it can go by. On the street, you hear operating, yelling, smashing sounds, banging on the door.”
Menahem, his mother and father and his siblings, Leo and Selma, escaped to Italy months later after which reached Haifa. His grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all perished within the Holocaust.
