Menahem Pressler - Professional Career

Professional Career

Menahem Pressler fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and emigrated to Palestine. His career was launched after he was awarded first prize at the Debussy International Piano Competition in San Francisco in 1946. This was followed by his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Since then, Pressler’s extensive tours of North America and Europe have included performances with the orchestras of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Dallas, San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Helsinki, among others. After a solo career of nearly a decade, he debuted as a chamber musician at the 1955 Berkshire Festival, where he appeared as the pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio, with Daniel Guilet, violin, and Bernard Greenhouse, cello.

Since 1955, for nearly 60 years, Menahem Pressler has taught on the piano faculty at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music where he holds the rank of Distinguished Professor of Music as the Charles Webb Chair. Pressler has had prize-winning students in all of the major international piano competitions, including the Queen Elizabeth, Busoni, Rubenstein, Leeds and Van Cliburn competitions, such as the Van Cliburn Competition from the Ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition to the Thirteenth. He worked closely for over 30 years with the Emerson String Quartet.

In 2010 he played at the Rheingau Musik Festival with Antonio Meneses, the last cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio, and appeared before in the series Rendezvous.