Master Classes with Menahem Pressler

William Brown

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253042941
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Menahem Pressler is a world-renowned piano soloist, master class teacher, and member of the acclaimed Beaux Arts Trio. In this companion to his first book, Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching, Pressler's former student William Brown brings together Pressler's teachings on an additional 37 piano masterworks by Johann Sebastian Bach, Samuel Barber, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, George Frideric Handel, Franz Joseph Haydn, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel, Franz Schubert, and Robert Schumann. With over 200 musical examples and measure-by-measure lessons on masterpieces of the piano repertoire as well as instructions on phrasing, fingering, imagery, dynamic contrasts, pianistic touches, articulation, and practice drills, pianists of all levels will benefit from Pressler's expertise.

Interlude II

Page Turners

The Trio was playing in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where Bernie Greenhouse had his house, and he asked a woman that he knew to turn my pages. So we play, and after a while, she turns the page. But there’s still a lot to play on that page, so I turn back. She turns again; I turn back. Then we come to the end of a page, and she doesn’t turn. I mean, I’ve been through that first piece and I’m exasperated. I was nearly dying, and we walk out and I say to her, “You play an instrument?” and she says, “No.”

I said, “Do you read music?”

She says, “No.”

I said, “Why did you decide to turn pages?”

She says, “Oh, Mr. Greenhouse says it’s easy; just turn when you nod.” But of course, I nod all the time.

Then I got even with him afterward.

Then there was a time in Spain when we played in Madrid, and there came a music teacher to turn the pages. She was really quite heavy, quite large, and she wore a kind of tent. I start to play, and she gets up to turn the pages, and I had to play in the bass, and my hand gets lost in her dress, and there I am, and I don’t know where the notes are, and she’s hovering over me. Four days later we play in Bilbao, and I see that I had forgotten the music of the Schumann Trio. So we went to the store and bought it. I asked the Music Society to provide a page turner, and there comes to the concert a mother with a thirteen-year-old boy who only speaks Spanish. There are some places where I repeat and some places where I don’t repeat, and I had to explain everything to her, and she explains it to him. After the horror in Madrid, I was ready for a real disaster. But this boy was perfect. He remembered everything. And as the concert ended and the public came in to congratulate, I was turning around to find him to thank him, and he had already gone; they had already taken him to bed. That was just the opposite. So you never know.

Another time in Berlin, for instance, I had a page turner, and each time he gets up to turn the page, he goes, “Tch, tch.” After a while, you sought to kill him because he’s always a critic. Every page, he goes, “Tch, tch.”

Another time, which was equally bad, each time the man had to turn the page, he would look at his watch. I asked him afterward, “Did you have to catch a train?” I mean, how is it that every time somebody starts to get up, he looks at his watch? Or there is the one who is more enthusiastic than you, who acts like he’s the one playing, who moves all around. That’s also bad.

Another terrible one was at Ravinia. She comes to the end of the Rachmaninoff Trio, which was being broadcast, and she stops turning! I’m going 120 miles an hour with both hands very busy, of course, and she doesn’t turn! You are not ready; you don’t expect that. The ending of the Rachmaninoff is the end of the concert, the last movement, millions of notes, and everybody playing intensely—and she doesn’t turn!

3 Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven’s music is the most varied, and the scale of emotions is absolutely the widest. In Beethoven you mirror, actually, the universe. It is true that Beethoven addresses you less than Schumann does; he always addresses the world. He always speaks for us, to us. And I find playing his music is the most challenging that I can imagine. It is enormously difficult physically, it is difficult emotionally, it’s difficult intellectually, and it is difficult stamina-wise. There’s not an elitism to this music; it could approach the peasant or it could approach the nobility, because he was as vulgar as he was spiritual. His high spirituality is metaphyical. It is what religions are all about; it speaks to the Holy Ghost, whatever Holy Ghost is in your mind. And the exact strength—the physical strength, the emotional strength—that holds it together, that made him write what he wrote, that made him write that enormous Hammerklavier that even today is one of the most modern pieces that you can find. I mean, in that fugue he out-fugues everybody, even the great-grandfather of all fugues, Bach. A fugue like that defies physical difficulties and at the same time is an outreach far into whatever ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Few Words Before
• Acknowledgments
• A Brief Biography
• Master Classes and Lessons
• Interlude I. Master Classes
• Interlude II. Page Turners
• Interlude III. Poor Pianos
• Interlude IV. Hotel Stories
• Interlude V. Missed Concerts
• Interlude VI. Funny Stories
• Interlude VII. Stories about Pianists
• Interlude VIII. Honorary Citizenship in Magdeburg, Germany
• Interlude IX. Through Hell and Back
• Interlude X. A New Love
• Appendix A. Menahem Pressler’s Musical Ancestry
• Appendix B. Tributes from Former Students and Other Musicians
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author