The Philadelphia Inquirer David Patrick Stearns Column: Beaux Arts Bows Out
By David Patrick Stearns, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Apr. 8–As is often the case in classical music, goodbye has little to do with farewell in the final Philadelphia concert by the Beaux Arts Trio.
Having led the trio for 53 years, pianist Menahem Pressler already has secured his post-Beaux Arts return to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, which presents the trio tomorrow, just as it has 22 times before in as many seasons. Pressler, 83, will be back next year, playing Dvorak with the Miro Quartet. Much else is in the wind.
“My desire, my hunger, has not been stilled. I can’t move to Florida and retire,” said the soft-spoken, deliberate pianist following a Temple University master class several months back. “I still practice like mad. I get up at 4:30 in the morning to get to my plane on time. And when I get to where I’m going, I’m doing what I want to do.”
That’s saying a lot, considering that the Beaux Arts Trio has won nearly every music award there is, has made at least 50 recordings for a variety of labels, and has traveled everywhere in roughly 80 engagements a year. But having expanded the piano trio repertoire enormously (the acclaimed Gyorgy Kurtag Piano Trio, written for the group, will be reprised Wednesday before a sellout audience at the Kimmel Center), Pressler doesn’t see himself going back.
“I will not do the things I used to do. I will do things where age is a great advantage — late Beethoven and Schubert sonatas,” he says. “My hands still follow [each other]. My head is aware.”
His wife, Sara, nicknamed him “the Lucky Mushroom” (it sounds more poetic in their native German), the lucky part being obvious, the mushroom part meaning that, for all of his musical charisma, Pressler has never been what you’d call statuesque.
Audiences are likely to consider themselves lucky, too. Few world-class pianists have dedicated themselves so much to chamber music. Pressler is now one of the few living links with the great pre-World War II musical culture of Germany, having fled his native Magdeburg as a teenager in 1938, settling in Israel where he met his wife before becoming one of the mainstays of the Indiana University music faculty in Bloomington.
His decision to disband the trio is actually belated. Having gone through four violinists as of six years ago, Pressler assumed the Beaux Arts had run its course. The 2002 addition of violinist Daniel Hope, however, was such an infusion of energy that many who had followed the trio for years felt that its current lineup — Pressler, Hope and cellist Antonio Meneses — represented a new peak.
“People say, ‘Why would you finish when it’s at its very best?’ I feel that Beaux Arts, if I may so, is an important institution in this country and in the world of chamber music. It stood for something,” he said. “When Jascha Heifetz stopped playing, he was a champion. I would like people to say that when Beaux Arts stopped, it did so at its finest.”
From the sounds of it, the trio should barely have lasted a season after its 1955 debut at Tanglewood. Chamber music wasn’t a full-time career then, and the fees were such that early tours, even traveling unglamorously by automobile, barely pulled a profit.
At the time, trio cellist Bernard Greenhouse was sought for lucrative recording sessions, and violinist Daniel Guilet was concertmaster of the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini. Pressler himself had a good U.S. solo career, starting in 1946 when he won first prize at the Debussy International Piano Competition in San Francisco.
Later, he was among the few soloists to have a three-year contract with the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1947, ensuring his presence there in consecutive seasons. He made numerous solo and concerto recordings, and was told by the legendary artist manager Arthur Judson that he could have a bigger career without chamber music. And Beaux Arts rehearsals were anything but a lovefest.
“Guilet was a taskmaster, a terrible taskmaster,” Pressler says. “Every second word in the rehearsal was an insult. I didn’t feel it as much as Greenhouse did. He reacted violently.
“But during the performance, the chemistry and the inspiration was something we were grateful for and happy about. We recorded the Ravel Piano Trio after only eight months of being a trio . . . and listening to it [now], I’m amazed. I didn’t know what I knew then!”
Guilet was replaced by Isidore Cohen in 1969, Greenhouse stepped down, and Peter Wiley stepped up in 1987. Ida Kavafian became violinist in 1992, and in 1998, the trio was reconfigured with Young Uck Kim and Meneses. When Kim suffered a recurring neck injury, Hope made the last-minute save in 2002.
Pressler is disarmingly frank about the music making behind the facts: “The pianist in a trio is first among equals. He’s the heartbeat of the trio; that’s how the scores are written. When I started out with Greenhouse and Guilet, we created something that had a sound that you could recognize.
“You could still hear the sound when Cohen joined. When Greenhouse left, just before he had his heart bypass surgery, Wiley came in, which was all right too, but he was no Greenhouse. When Kavafian came in, I started to feel that it wasn’t the sound of Beaux Arts.”
Defining that sound is elusive — he talks about the “wisdom” of Guilet and the “solidity” of Greenhouse. The Kim/Meneses lineup was promising, he says, but Kim’s injury forced him to drop out in the middle of a tour. Pressler refers to the addition of Hope, who had just had a recording session canceled, as “one of the lucky breaks that happened to the Lucky Mushroom.” Despite a burgeoning career as a soloist, Hope gladly reserved blocks of his year to travel to Bloomington for work with Pressler.
The pianist has never been one to say that everything was better in ages past. However, when chamber music performance began taking on a more symphonic amplitude in the 1970s, Pressler ever more pointedly exemplified the idea that great things are best said without shouting.
“Music is the language of the ear, not the language of the muscle,” he says.
“The great moment of a performance isn’t the entertaining part. The intimate moment is the most important. . . . What’s exceptionally beautiful about music, it doesn’t have words. You find feelings you didn’t know you had.”
Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at dstearns@phillynews.com.
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