Three Who Add Up to One

By Christopher Porterfield

The Beaux Arts Trio marks 25 years of collective virtuosity

"Remember Chicago?" asks Pianist Menahem Pressler. "The page-turner who couldn't read music? After only a few bars she turned the page. I turned it back. After a few more bars she turned it again. I turned it back again. Then when the right moment came--nothing."

Pressler looks over at Violinist Isadore Cohen and Cellist Bernard Green- house, who nod and chuckle. The three men, otherwise known as the Beaux Arts Trio, are reminiscing about their precarious years on tour. It is something they do with almost the same warmth and brio as when they make music together.

"One of the only concerts we ever missed," recalls Cohen, "was in Rockville, Md., at Thanksgiving. A plane crash had tied up air traffic at the Washington airport, so we decided to drive from New York. There were six lanes of traffic, none of them moving. At Trenton, we tried to switch to a train. Impossible. A storm blew up. We couldn't even phone ahead. When we arrived at the hall it was 9:30 p.m., and there were 30 people left. We played the Mendelssohn D-Minor Trio and told them we'd come back."

Greenhouse indicates his cello, a 1707 Stradivarius. "When we travel by plane I put it on the seat next to mine," he says. "The airlines usually let me pay half-fare for it. One time a clerk read 'Greenhouse, Cello' on the ticket and thought it was a child's name. 'How old?' he asked. I said, 'Two hundred sixty-seven years.'"

The Beaux Arts has earned the right to look back in laughter, and in triumph too. Now in its 25th year, it is one of the most durable and distinguished of chamber groups. Among the world's piano trios, there is none better. All three members perform well enough to be soloists. But even the greatest virtuosos who join together as a trio can remain just that: a trio. The Beaux Arts players' real virtuosity lies in their ability to become, as Greenhouse puts it, "one instrument."

This is harder to do in a piano trio than in, say, a string quartet, because the piano and strings are a mixed marriage. The piano always threatens to be louder; its attack, sustained tones and tempered pitch all differ from those of bowed instruments. So subtly do the Beaux Arts members adjust for these vagaries that they match the interplay of the score itself, passing phrases seamlessly from one to another, ebbing and flowing naturally with the dynamic pulse. Goethe described architecture as frozen music. A Beaux Arts performance is liquid architecture.

Whatever they play from their repertory of some 50 trios--in a recent appearance at Carnegie Hall, it was Beethoven, Ravel and Schubert--their work reflects years of study, discussion and meticulous rehearsal. Yet it is never reduced to rote. "During a concert, the one who has an inspiration will go with it," says Pressler. "The others will follow, even if they disagree. Then we do not simply replay a piece, we re-create it."

The same spontaneity comes through in their recordings. Their most recent releases are a remarkable survey of 43 Haydn trios, many of which had fallen into neglect. Polished as the performances are, they also vibrate with the joy of discovering treasures in seldom heard pieces and new ways of treasuring familiar ones.

Before the players were one, of course, they were three. Pressler, 56, was the son of a German clothing-store owner who fled Hitler to settle in Tel Aviv. As a boy, he got splinters in his fingers from practicing, because the keys of the family up right were worn to the wood. At 17, he journeyed to the Debussy competition in San Francisco to see how he might do against his contemporaries. He won, and promptly launched a U.S. concert career.

Greenhouse, 64, whose father was a Newark real estate broker, was nine when he heard a cello solo in the William Tell Overture and recognized "the sound that I wanted for the rest of my life." After scholarship studies at Juilliard, he spent two years with Pablo Casals in Europe. In 1954, he got together with Pressler and Daniel Guilet, concertmaster of the Symphony of the Air, for a projected recording of Mozart trios. The recording fell through, but the three decided to try their luck on the concert circuit.

When Guilet retired in 1968, Pressler and Greenhouse turned to Cohen, who is now 57. The son of a Brooklyn scrap-metal dealer, Cohen may have had music instilled in him by a grandmother who took him to the Yiddish theater and hummed through all the performances. He studied with Ivan Galamian at Juilliard and refined his chamber music skills during ten years as second violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet.

Between tours (they play about 120 concerts a year), the trio and their families are scarcely neighbors. Pressler is based in Bloomington, Ind., where he teaches at Indiana University. Greenhouse and Cohen are both on the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, but Greenhouse lives in Setauket, Long Island, Cohen in Manhattan. With luck, Greenhouse gets in some sailing, and Cohen plays tennis or tends his plants (he is a former member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America). Pressler's recreation? "Playing and teaching, playing and teaching."

After such separateness, they renew their striving for greater togetherness. "There is never a plateau," says Pressler. "The masterpieces we play always force us to go that one step further." As in a performance, he cocks his head at the others, seems to get an unspoken assent. "The only plateau we'll reach is the cemetery."

--Christopher Porterfield

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