At 92, pianist Menahem Pressler is still hot on the concert circuit

BOSTON — By every measure, renowned pianist Menahem Pressler has led a noteworthy, age-defying career.

For over six decades, the 92-year-old German-born, Israeli American has performed on the stages of the world’s most acclaimed concert halls. He continues to teach at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, where he’s been a revered and influential member of the faculty since 1955. The six-time Grammy nominee has been recognized with scores of prestigious awards.

Last month, Pressler achieved yet one more milestone, playing his first solo performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Center, the BSO’s famed summer home in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

The sprightly nonagenarian is no stranger to Tanglewood. He has performed there since the 1950s, but always as part of a chamber group, most frequently with the Beaux Arts Trio, which he founded in 1955. The Trio disbanded in 2008 after more than a half century setting the gold standard in chamber music in more than 30 recordings and thousands of concerts.

“Am I excited? And how!” Pressler told The Times of Israel, days before the August 19 concert in the Koussevitsky Music Shed.

Speaking by phone from the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, the engaging and delightful conversationalist gushed that the upcoming concert was the stuff of dreams — a gorgeous concerto, the world famous conductor Charles Dutoit and the BSO, one of the great orchestras of the world.

Israeli audiences have the chance to hear Pressler when he returns to the stage at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival on Saturday night, in a chamber performance of Dvorak’s Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major.

At the August 19 Tanglewood concert, Pressler received a standing ovation for his magnificent, stirring performance of Mozart’s Concerto in A Major, one of his most beloved pieces of music.

“I am fond of many concerti, especially Mozart. This one has something unusual in every respect,” he said. In particular, he noted that the second movement is written in F Sharp Minor, a key that is used very seldom.

“The adagio is unique in its beauty and unique, how shall I say it, in its ability to move people to tears. It goes right to the heart,” he said.

He admitted that it has that affect on him, as well. “Indeed, it does,” move him to tears, he said. “It always did,” he added, recalling that he learned the movement as a child.

Pressler “has an incredible sense of other worldliness, great inner calm and knowledge of the world which comes through in performance,” according to Anthony Fogg, the BSO’s artistic administrator and director of Tanglewood who has known Pressler for some 30 years.

He brings an inward quality to the music, Fogg said of Pressler, whom he described as a sweet person with a delicate spirit.

“It comes from so far in his heart and consciousness. That’s really what makes it so special,” said Fogg.

Fogg noted Pressler’s special affinity for Tanglewood. The Beaux Arts Trio that he led for 50 years had its first and last concerts there. “Menahem was the constant,” through all of the different combinations of the Trio’s players, he said.

Recalling his original partners in the trio, violinist Daniel Guilet and cellist Bernard Greenhouse, Pressler said that they shared a belief that there was always more to be found.

“The playing of the works was always a search for more beauty. The bluebird of happiness. We were looking for that,” he said.

One long-time fan used a similar reference in describing Pressler’s mesmerizing concerts. Bernard Hyatt, an avid listener of classical music and former publisher and editor of Boston’s Jewish Advocate, has followed Pressler for decades and rarely missed a concert of the Beaux Arts Trio when they played in Boston.

‘It was like watching two performances at once, he was like an excited bird’

“It was like watching two performances at once,” said Hyatt, who is also in his early 90s. One was Pressler’s singular musicianship. But the other was watching him lead the trio by moving his head. “He was like an excited bird,” Hyatt said.

After the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded, Pressler embarked on an ambitious solo career and has continued to perform and travel all over the world. In 2014, he made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker and later that year he performed with the orchestra again, at a New Year’s Eve concert conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. One week later, he was at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he underwent a relatively rare heart surgery for a previously unknown, life-threatening condition. In a video about the procedure, Pressler described his surgeon, Dr. Virendra Patel, as a miracle doctor.

Not surprisingly, Pressler is asked frequently about his longevity. He recalled the response he offered to a reporter from Germany’s Der Spiegel.

“When I play, I don’t feel older than 50. When I teach, I don’t feel older than 40. When I walk up the stairs, it’s another story,” he said with a chuckle.

When the energetic Pressler takes the stage in Jerusalem, he’ll be returning to a place where he feels deeply rooted.

“In my heart, I still live there,” he said. Pressler’s family settled in Palestine after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 when Pressler was a teen. “In a way, I was reborn,” he recalled.

‘When I play, I don’t feel older than 50. When I teach, I don’t feel older than 40. When I walk up the stairs, it’s another story’

Israel is also where he met his wife, Sara, a Sabra who lived in Petah Tikvah. He lived in Tel Aviv, but they were married in Jerusalem, by Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, who was then Israel’s chief rabbi and the father of Chaim Herzog, who later became Israel’s sixth president.

In 2007, Pressler was appointed as an Honorary Fellow of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Two years before that he received the German President’s Cross of Merit and in 2009, he received honorary citizenship from his hometown of Magdeburg. “It was like an act of reconciliation,” he said at the time.

His influence in Israel is evident from today’s Israeli pianists who studied with Pressler in Bloomington, including Asaf Zohar.

As he continues to move audiences with his dazzling and heartfelt playing, Pressler revealed he is always searching for that elusive something, “that which we call inspiration,” he said.

Anticipating his performance at Tanglewood, Pressler said, “I am looking for the inspiration that night, playing this heavenly concerto. It’s a privilege, a pleasure and in a sense, a duty. It is my life.”