Interview
Menahem Pressler in conversation with Carolin Pirich Semyon Bychkov and Menahem Pressler
Menahem Pressler, pianist of the famous Beaux Arts Trio for more than 50 years, is a legend. In January 2014, the 90-year-old made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 and enchanted the audience with his sensitive, warm and eloquent playing. The conductor is Semyon Bychkov, who leads the orchestra in a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s enigmatic Eleventh Symphony in the second half of the concert.
Pianist Menahem Pressler is a legend: at 17 this shooting star with a “talent for luck” won the Debussy International Piano Competition in San Francisco (its distinguished jury included the recent French émigré Darius Milhaud). His debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy was followed by an impressive international solo career and, from summer 1955 with the Beaux Arts Trio’s debut – a no less impressive career as a chamber musician. In this concert, the 90-year-old grand seigneur of the piano makes a guest appearance with the Berliner Philharmoniker, dedicated to a concerto by one of his favourite composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
On the rostrum accompanying Pressler is Semyon Bychkov, who in the programme’s second half conducts Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. Completed in the aftermath of the suppressed Hungarian uprising, it seems to foretell a fate for the ossified Soviet Union similar to that of the ossified Russian Empire. It was Herbert von Karajan who mentioned Bychkov as a possible successor in Berlin after hearing one of his Shostakovich recordings with the Berliner Philharmoniker. “I did not experience the mass terror of the Soviet Union as Shostakovich did”, says Bychkov. “But I can nonetheless imagine the conditions under which he lived, and can identify with them.”
Berliner Philharmoniker
Semyon Bychkov
Menahem Pressler
© 2014 Berlin Phil Media GmbH
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