Pianist Menachem Pressler, founder of the Beaux Arts Trio, has died at the age of 99.

German-born pianist Menachem Pressler, founder of Trio Beaux Arts, died Saturday in London at the age of 99, Indiana University in the US, where he has taught for more than six decades, said this Sunday.

Menachem Pressler, one of the most recurring names in the Musical Seasons of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, made his last appearance in Lisbon in January 2018 with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 1 of the most beautiful.” composer.

For the pianist, who remained active for several years before his death, it all turned into a “joy to bring music” to concert halls, to find people willing to share it with him, something that touched him and touched him “so deeply”. that he couldn’t give up, he told The Boston Globe in November 2016 when he returned to action a year after undergoing surgery for an aortic aneurysm.

Pressler, whom the Musical Service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation calls “one of the most prestigious pianists”, was born in Magdeburg, Germany on December 16, 1923, and lived there until the Nazi regime forbade him from teaching because he was Jewish.

Witness the history of the last century. He left with his family for Italy in 1938, after Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, took refuge in Palestine in 1939, and settled in the United States in the early 1940s, where he has lived ever since.

He won the San Francisco International Debussy Piano Competition in 1946. He was 23 years old and shortly thereafter began his concert career with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with maestro Eugene Ormandy, a career that has continued with the world’s greatest orchestras. time., first in the US, and in Europe after the end of World War II.

In 1955, he founded the Trio Beaux Arts – “one of the most famous and influential chamber groups in the world”, according to Gulbenkian, of which Pressler was the only permanent member until its dissolution in 2008.

The pianist, however, has not abandoned a regular live performance schedule with a program spanning the entire repertoire, from Mozart to Brahms, from Schubert and Schumann to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and César Franck, among his other favorite composers.

In 2015, he suspended his activities after surgery, but quickly returned to concert halls and teaching, which he continued to teach at the Indiana University School of Music, to which he has belonged since 1955, and to which he has remained. connected.

It was a love of music and people, in vigorous activity, as he claimed. “I play, I am accompanied, which makes the music more beautiful and offers [ao público] something you can enjoy,” he told the Boston Globe in November 2016. “Playing the music I love is what I truly believe I was born for,” he added.

In a career spanning over 70 years, he has received several Gramophone, Diapason, Choc Musique, Charles Cros, and Classica Awards, Meritorious Service Medals from the US National Society of Arts and Letters, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Music Teachers Association Career Award.

In 2005, the German government awarded him the Grand Cross of Merit and the French government appointed him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.

He received the Wigmore Hall Medal (2011) in the UK, the Yehudi Menuhin Award (2012) in Spain, the Indiana University Medal (2013) and was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012.

With the Beaux Arts Trio, he has recorded almost the entire chamber music repertoire, resulting in 60 albums, almost all top-rated Penguin and Gramophone reference books on a selection of classical music recordings. Solo he added three dozen equally outstanding albums, spanning over three centuries of music, from Johann Sebastian Bach’s baroque expression to Ben-Chaim’s contemporary.

Menachem Pressler has been a regular participant in the festivals and musical seasons of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation since the mid-1950s. His last concert in Lisbon was part of a European tour that included appearances at the Amsterdam Concertbau, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Laisshall in Hamburg.

In 2016, he told The Times of Israel, “When I play, I’m no more than 50, and when I teach, I’m no more than 40.”