While continuing his successful career as a soloist in recital and with orchestras, Pressler co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, which today is considered the world’s foremost piano trio, regularly appearing in major international music centers and festivals. Since its debut concert on July 13, 1955, the Trio has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, South America, and the Middle East, as well as at the Olympics in South Korea and Australia. Annual concert appearances include series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Celebrity Series of Boston, and the Library of Congress. The Trio has recorded fifty albums, including almost the entire chamber literature with piano on the Philips label, and has been awarded numerous honors, including England’s Record of the Year Award, four Grammy nominations, Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year, the Toscanini Award, the German Recording Award, the Prix Mondial du Disque, three Grand Prix du Disques, the Union de la Presse Musicale Belge Award, and Record of the Year awards from both Gramophone and Stereo Review. On July 14, 2005, the Trio celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a performance at the Tanglewood Festival.

In the same year that he co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, Pressler joined the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He was named to the Dean Charles H. Webb Chair of Music in 1998 and currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor. In addition to presenting master classes worldwide, Pressler also has served as a juror for the Van Cliburn, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, Arthur Rubinstein, and Paloma O’Shea piano competitions and the International Piano-e-Competition.

In 1994 Pressler was honored with Chamber Music America’s Distinguished Service Award, and in 1995 he won the German Critics’ Ehrenurkunde award for having set the standard for chamber music over the previous forty years. In 1998, he received one of only five Lifetime Achievement Awards granted in the last fifty years by Gramophone magazine, placing him in the distinguished company of Dame Joan Sutherland, Sir Georg Solti, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Sir Yehudi Menuhin. In 2002 Pressler was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit from the National Society of Arts and Letters, which recognized him for “a long and distinguished career not only as an internationally recognized concert artist but also a teacher and mentor of young artists.” In 1986 he was invited to dinner at the White House. In 2005, he was named a commander in France’s Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural honor, and soon after received the German President’s Deutsche Bundesverdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit), Germany’s highest cultural honor. In 2006 he was awarded the Concertgebouw Prize, and in 2007 he was named an Honorary Fellow of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. In addition, Pressler has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences andreceivedhonorary doctorates from the UniversityofNebraska-Lincoln, the North Carolina School of the Arts, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Pressler has continued to perform as a soloist, having made his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 1996 in the Great Performers Series. He has also recorded thirty solo albums. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife, Sara. Their son, Ami, is a hospital laboratory technician in Bloomington and their daughter, Edna, is a clinical psychologist and director of the University of Massachusetts-Boston Counseling Center.

The New York Times has called Pressler “a prodigious talent” with “exceptional gifts.” The Washington Evening Star praised him as “a poet of the piano.” And Le Figaro in Paris has hailed him as “one of the greatest living pianists.”

For more than fifty years, since 1955, Pressler has maintained a full class of fifteen to thirty students. This would be remarkable in itself even without the twenty-four weeks of the year that he is on tour, presenting more than 120 concerts with the famed Beaux Arts Trio or performing solo piano recitals. His former students are now faculty members of conservatories and music schools around the world, and the influence of his performance and teaching has shaped the way many people perform and listen to music, especially in the realm of chamber music.

Pressler presents students with a technical regime that ensures their ability to play without physical tension, an approach that frees the student from injury or abuse from strain, despite hours of daily practice. Pressler’s method produces finger dexterity, sonorous sound, a command of touches, and a myriad of tonal colors.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect students gain from working with Pressler is to begin to share his ability to hear the limitless possibilities of color that are available in piano playing. His keen ear, musical sensitivity, and tremendous insights are easily recognized by the perceptive listener and can be systematically transmitted from teacher to student so as to affect the shaping of melodies, balance of musical lines, and rhythmic flow.

People often ask Pressler how he maintains his boundless enthusiasm, to which he offers this standard reply: “When you wake up and you see a very beautiful new day is coming, that is the way you keep your enthusiasm up. You take a piece of music and you feel renewed. You feel, ‘That’s what I wanted to do all my life, and now that I have the opportunity and the privilege of being able to do it, should I not be happy or full of gratitude? Or should I feel, ‘Oh, I’ve done that before. There is nothing new?’ I have never felt—and I don’t think the Trio’s ever felt—that we have dug to the deepest possible way that one can dig into these masterpieces. So, for us, a lifetime is barely long enough to dig, to find, and to renew that which makes our lives worth living as musicians.”

Pressler seeks to share his insights, those things that have worked for him in practice and on the concert stage. He does not compromise his musical standards, and he demands the highest level of musical performance from himself and his students. As Mia Kim Hynes remembers him saying at her first lesson with him when she was only fourteen, “You are playing the Chopin Ballade today, and I will teach you as an adult.”

Being selected into Pressler’s class is a much-sought-after distinction, but that is when the work really begins. Pressler’s students must dedicate a minimum of four to six hours to daily piano practice. Although the long-range goal may be a public recital, the immediate incentive is preparing for the next lesson. The nature of the lessons is demanding and uncompromising. No matter how prepared the student is for the lesson, Pressler uses that preparation as a basis for further study into the score, looking for more depth of musical expression, solving technical difficulties, and taking the performance to a higher level of achievement and understanding. Because Pressler is frequently away from campus, touring with the Beaux Arts Trio or playing solo recitals or presenting master classes, a student may receive a cluster of two or three lessons in the same week, which increases the demands of practice during this time.

As deadlines for competitions or recitals approach, Pressler’s teaching style becomes less specific and detailed. At this stage, he may sing along with the melodies, perhaps conducting with his arms and body, striving for climaxes and insisting on a consistent tempo to ensure structural integrity of the performance. There may be discussion of how the acoustics of the hall will affect the listener’s perception of the piece. Pedaling may become adjusted and the musical character more defined.

Once students leave his studio, they have learned to perform with confidence and security because they know what they have accomplished and understand how far they have come. They have observed Pressler’s work ethic, and they have seen his example of a performer’s life. They know what can be accomplished, how to achieve results from their practice, how to listen in depth to their own playing, and what to expect when they listen to others. They have learned a great deal of repertoire from their own studies and from listening to other students in performance classes and recitals. They have learned principles of technique that ensure looseness and flexibility. They know how to establish goals for learning repertoire. They have learned principles of musical expression that can be applied to all music, and they have learned how to play with color, how to shape a melody, and how to adapt to different pianos. They are indeed ready for whatever musical opportunities await them.