The World is a Poorer Place – Losing Two Musical Giants By Thomas Wolf

In recent months, death has claimed two musical giants. One of these individuals was only 56 years old when he died. The other lived to the ripe old age of 99. One was born in Magdeburg, Germany, a cultural capital with stunning architecture and a long tradition of music dating back to George Philip Telemann. The other was born in College Station Texas and grew up in Canada’s Western Ontario—neither location being particularly noted for its classical music or musicians. One of the men was tall and lanky, the other short and portly. One played the violin, the other the piano. Yet when these two individuals came together on the concert stage, there was a special spark and it was as if all the differences between them disappeared. Their remarkable synchrony and merged musical vision made for memorable events.

The older man was the pianist, Menahem Pressler, who died on May 6, 2023 in London where he lived in one of his homes. His other home was in Bloomington, Indiana, where he had served on the music faculty at Indiana University since 1955.

Menahem Pressler in 2009 one year after the disbanding of the Beaux Arts Trio at age 84. His concert schedule did not let up though. It simply shifted to solo work and other kinds of chamber music well into his nineties.

That was the same year that Pressler and two of his colleagues—violinist, Daniel Guilet and cellist Bernard Greenhouse—formed the Beaux Arts Trio, arguably the most important ensemble of its kind during the second half of the twentieth century. Though other violinists and cellist would come and go, Pressler remained the group’s anchor for more than 50 years. He finally disbanded the Beaux Arts in 2008 at the age of 84, a time when most distinguished musicians would have long since retired. But Pressler kept on performing, refocusing his career by playing concerts with orchestra, solo recitals, and chamber music.

I was probably 11 or 12 the first time I heard Pressler and the Beaux Arts Trio. It was in one of the group’s early seasons, before the Beaux Arts became world-famous. There was a series in Philadelphia called “Coffee Concerts” and my violinist grandmother thought it was about time for me to become familiar with important chamber music literature. (It would be decades before I learned that she herself had played in a famous piano trio in Russia with her sister and brother years before.) I remember the evening as a perfect introduction to piano trio masterpieces. The group began with Beethoven’s “Ghost” trio followed by the monumental B major trio by Brahms. After intermission, the program concluded with Ravel’s magical piano trio.

When you have time, listen to those three pieces, preferably in succession as I did that night. What a program! The evening was a musical revelation and started me on my road to a career presenting chamber music concerts—something I did for half a century.

The Beaux Arts Trio in 1980 (from left: Menahem Pressler, Isador Cohen, Bernard Greenhouse)

Though I never presented the Beaux Arts Trio in concert, I did present Pressler on numerous occasions after the Trio disbanded. That was many years after a mishap that started our relationship out on the wrong foot. Both of us had been scheduled as guest artists on a chamber series and a poster had been printed that inadvertently listed my name under his photograph and his name under mine. I found the mistake amusing but when the poster was put up on a bulletin board at Indiana University, Pressler did not find it funny. Fortunately, by the time I engaged him as a guest on my own series, the event was forgotten.

 That first time I invited Pressler to play at Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine occurred in 2007 soon after he announced that the Beaux Arts would be disbanded. I had heard he might be open to playing chamber music with other groups and I was ecstatic when he accepted the invitation and came regularly for many wonderful collaborations.

One of these was in 2011, when violinist Shmuel Ashkenasi suggested that I try to lure Pressler again to our summer series.  I had hired Shmuel to play a sonata program and asked who he would like as his pianist.

“Menahem Pressler,” he answered without hesitation.

The request surprised me. I had performed with Shmuel off and on for years. He was the master of the long musical line. But I thought of Pressler as someone who was more interested in fine detail. When I asked Shmuel about it, his answer was simple. “He is a great musician.” That was all he needed to say.

Now to the younger “musical giant” who passed away, tragically, on October 19, 2022 of pancreatic cancer at an age when many great musicians are just beginning to make their mark. His name was Geoff Nuttall and his performing career is defined largely by another chamber music ensemble—the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) of which he was the founding first violinist.

The most recent iteration of the Saint Lawrence String Quartet (from left): Christopher Costanza, Leslie Robertson, Owen Dalby, Geoff Nuttall. Geoff and Leslie were founding members.

It was the pianist Leonard Hokanson who first told me about Geoff and the SLSQ at a time that the Quartet was just starting out. Leonard had recently performed with the group and urged that I book them right away. Rarely did I engage musicians without hearing them first, but I trusted Leonard and went ahead. Thus began a relationship that lasted for many years with the ensemble becoming the resident quartet of our series. Geoff was an outsize presence in the group.

As Geoff’s “New York Times” obituary stated, “he played the violin with such enthusiasm that he often swept himself from his seat…” The obituary continued:

“Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s ‘secret weapon,’ as the rest of the group admits,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2001. “His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously improvised.” Mr. Nuttall’s electrifying ability to engage flowed from his deep desire to communicate even at the expense of other, blandly technical virtues…”

Like so many others, I experienced the incredible excitement of playing with Geoff and the SLSQ. It was always an adventure. Performances, even of the same piece, were never the same and were always inspired, and it was Geoff who generally led us all on the musical journey.

Tall and lanky, Geoff Nuttall, violinist and founding member of the Saint Lawrence String Quartet with me at an after-concert party. I used to joke that he was such a great musician and so tall, he would always be looking down at me.

Like Ashkenasi, Geoff also wanted to play with Menahem Pressler once the older musician retired from the Beaux Arts Trio and thus began a lovely association. As we planned programs, at first, Pressler was willing to play any kind of ensemble music from duos to sextets—everything, that is, except piano trios. Having recorded virtually the entire trio repertoire and made his mark as a trio pianist, that literature would now be off limits. But Pressler adored Geoff and when the violinist begged him to play a trio, the pianist relented and they began by playing the Schubert B-flat trio together and subsequently other trios as well. Watching and listening to them in rehearsal, I could tell that Geoff and cellist Christopher Costanza were incredibly deferential to Menachem, and rehearsals turned out to be more like music lessons. The results were always remarkable.

Both Geoff and Menachem were great teachers and coaches but their styles were very different. Pressler was a teacher in the European tradition—serious and focused on musical detail above all. Nuttall had a lighter touch—humor was definitely part of his magic and he was not above suggesting tricks that had little to do with the music itself, like using the body to create an impression of volume and intensity as in this segment from a coaching session from Bay Chamber Concerts’ Next Generation program in Rockport, Maine.

Pressler’s attention to detail extended beyond music to all aspects of his life. He loved good food and planning the menu of after-concert dinners that he would be attending was as nerve-racking as producing the concerts themselves. But he always ate heartily and enthusiastically, as did Geoff, though one had to work hard to keep up with whatever special diet Geoff happened to be on. Somehow, conveniently for a venue in Maine, lobster always seemed to align with both men’s tastes and diets.

Pressler appreciated beauty in many forms right down to the design of his ties. On one occasion, he had been practicing at my mother’s house. He liked her Steinway but he also felt comfortable with her as someone who had grown up in Europe in a musical family, spoke several languages as he did, and appreciated great playing. He would put in a couple of hours of practice in the morning and then she would make him lunch.

On this particular day, he seemed upset and when my mother asked him why, he told her that he had lost his favorite tie. My mother, who was only recently widowed, told Menachem that she would be honored if he took one of my father’s ties—there was quite a collection of them and she directed the pianist to a walk-in closet in a bedroom while she went to the kitchen to prepare lunch.

Forty-five minutes later, my mother started to worry. There was no sign of Menachem and no sound coming from the closet. Could something have happened to the man who was now close to ninety? Opening the closet door, she saw Menachem staring at three ties.

“Oh, this is so difficult,” he said sadly.

He then described in detail the design elements of each of the three ties and the reason that making a choice between them was so difficult. It was like the detail he extracted from a beautiful musical phrase.

Menachem Pressler with me after a concert in which he was wearing one of my father’s ties.

“I am sure my husband would have been honored if you took all three,” said my mother. The pianist beamed with pleasure as he carefully folded the three ties and put them in his satchel.

I am not sure if that is what cemented their close friendship but when my mother died a few years later, Menahem called me from Brussels to express his condolences. At a concert the following summer, he and Geoff and the St. Lawrence decided at the last minute to play an encore (the slow movement of the Brahms piano quintet) in my mother’s memory. The performance was not without anxiety as one of the pages turned out to be missing from the Xerox copy of the piano part that had been hastily assembled and brought to the concert venue. But sitting next to Menachem as his page turner, I needn’t have worried. Perhaps the spirit of my mother intervened. It somehow came right in the end.