Brazil mourns ‘one of our greatest soloists’

The US-Brazilian oboist Harold Emert has published this appreciation of the international cellist Antonio Meneses, who died of cancer this weekend.

Rio de Janeiro–
Internationally renowned Brazilian cellist who won the Tchaikovsky prize in Moscow, Antonio Meneses died on Saturday in Basel, Switzerland. One of the leading musicians of his generation, he was diagnosed in June with gliobastoma multiforme, an aggressive type of brain tumour. There will be no funeral, at the request of the musician himself, and his body will be cremated. Meneses leaves behind his wife, Satoko, and his son, Otávio, from his first marriage.

Meneses’s father, French horn player João Gerônimo, had a career plan for his five children: they should all play string instruments, because that’s where orchestras had the most openings. When he turned ten, his father,came home with a child’s cello that belonged to a friend.

Antonio Meneses began studying in 1967 with Nydia Otero and developed rapidly: in 1971, at the age of 13, he was already playing with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra. Within the orchestra itself, his admirers were such that they practically forced Italian cellist Antonio Janigro (1918-1989) to listen to him between rehearsals for a concert in Brazil in 1971 with the orchestra… “Then my teacher Mrs Nydia said to me: you have to leave now, otherwise you’ll stay in this life as an orchestral musician and that’ll be that,” Meneses recalled in 2020. And so, in 1974, Menezes departed for Düsseldorf, with money from his musician’s savings and no knowledge of the language, and then to Stuttgart. He played at weddings, wakes etc. to support himself.

Janigro helped the young cellist and his international career began in 1977, when he performed Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Fantasia for Cello and Orchestra” in Washington. That same year, wearing borrowed clothes, he won the Munich Radio and TV awards. In 1982, he travelled to Moscow to compete against 68 other artists in the Tchaikovsky Competition, beating the Soviet Aleksandr Rudin.

“I learnt later that a representative of the Soviet Ministry of Culture asked the chair of the jury if I was really good and allowed the prize to be awarded to me,” Meneses said in 2020. “According to the bureaucrat, the USSR had no diplomatic disputes with Brazil, so they could give me the prize. Sometimes it’s not enough to play well.”

As a prize, he recorded Antonín Dvorák’s “Cello Concerto” with the Moscow Philharmonic. Six months later, Herbert von Karajan, summoned the 24-year-old. Excited by the advances in digital recording, Karajan was returning to record some works and favoured teaming up with up-and-coming young musicians for the opportunity to impose his personal conceptions on them. As well as including him, in January 1983, in a recording of Brahms’ Double Concerto (for violin, cello and orchestra, alongside the virtuoso Anne Sophie Mutter), in 1986 he cast Meneses in the role he had already given to Mstislav Rostropovich (for EMI) and Pierre Fournier (for Deutsche Grammophon) in the splendid symphonic poem “Don Quixote, op.35 “by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) in front of the Berlin Philharmonic.

This is undoubtedly the episode that most quickly determined Meneses’ greatness, which is no small feat in a post-war era that saw virtuosos such as Jacqueline du Pré, Yo Yo Ma and Mischa Maisky. He achieved this without ever being labelled as a “Latin” interpreter, so to speak, cut out for the compositions of Villa-Lobos and little else: rather, he sought to understand each work and what it demanded, and thus became an interpreter of reference, whether in Bach’s Six Suites (which he recorded three times), Beethoven’s trios or Elgar’s Concerto. When he was criticised, it was for over-calculation, not rapture.

“I usually approach works long before I actually start learning them. It’s a kind of courtship, which for me is very important so that there is an intellectual and spiritual familiarisation with it. After that, I often start studying it even if I don’t have a concert booked. Only when I feel comfortable with it do I set the date for the ‘wedding’, or in this case, the performance.” He detailed this process in the book “Antonio Meneses – The Architecture of Emotion”, in which he was interviewed by journalists Luciana Medeiros and João Luiz Sampaio while recovering from the removal of a tumour in his arm in 2009.
If Karajan was the springboard, the choice of chamber music at the highest level ended up setting him on a scale of lesser record production, but absolutely sophisticated in terms of partnerships and live performances. Married in the early 1980s to Filipino pianist Cecile Licad (with whom he had his only son, Otavio), Meneses made contact in the USA with the Beaux Arts Trio. He was a member from 1998 to 2008, when the group disbanded. “Meneses has an infallible technique, a sonority of special beauty and a search for musicality that make him an artist like few others,” said the veteran Menahem Pressler, who died aged 100 in 2023.

‘Meneses believed that much of his learning came from observing human singing and from a certain search. “To this day I often tell my students that the most important thing a string player can do is listen to singers. You learn that any kind of music is pure rhetoric, it’s poetry, it’s telling a story. It’s important to try to understand the most and least accented points, like the most and least accented syllables. All music imitates this, and if you don’t listen to singing, you don’t understand the points of support and relaxation.”

In a very discreet life, which included being a professor at the University of Bern from 2008 until his retirement in 2023, his CV is astonishing. He collaborated with Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Muti and André Previn, among others. While it’s true that he settled in Basel, Meneses has always found a way to collaborate with national artists and orchestras, such as pianists Cristina Ortiz and Nelson Freire, harpsichordist Rosana Lanzelotte and, more recently, Cristian Budu, with whom he recorded Debussy, Ravel, Franck and Fauré in 2023. Also noteworthy is his partnership with Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires, who is as shy as he is; they went on tour and in 2012 recorded a recital at London’s mythical Wigmore Hall, released by Deutsche Grammophon. Finally, he imitated Rostropovich and commissioned works from Brazilian composers that he premiered and played around the world, publicising names such as Ronaldo Miranda, Marlos Nobre, Edino Krieger, Almeida Prado, Marisa Rezende, Marco Padilha and, more recently, André Mehmari.

Meneses announced his farewell from the stage on 7 July in order to receive palliative care at home, after being diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, one of the most aggressive types of brain cancer. He was just a few days away from his 67th birthday on 23 August. Antonio Meneses leaves behind his second wife, Satoku Kuroda, with whom he had lived in Basel since 1989, a precious discography on labels such as AVIE and Azul Music, and a cathedral-like silence in Brazilian classical music.

Brazil´s Ministry of Culture released a note of condolence: “The Ministry of Culture (MinC) is saddened to learn of the death of cellist Antonio Meneses. One of the greatest soloists of his generation, he had a vast discography and played on the world’s main stages. (…) As well as a legacy based on constant improvement, the cellist shared a love of classical music, of which he was a great scholar and also a teacher. We join his family, friends and admirers of his work in this moment of farewell, but of deep gratitude for his construction and contribution to our culture.”

Brazilian musical impresaria Myrian Dauelsberg, issued a statement. “In 1982, I was in Moscow invited by the Tchaikovsky International Competition to attend the traditional competition of the same name in the cello category. Our Brazilian Antônio Menezes won, and the jury nominated him to speak on behalf of the winning candidates about the competition. Antônio Meneses was very shy and had to be convinced by me that he couldn’t refuse this great honour. It was the start of a brilliant international career. The musical world is in mourning. Dellarte is saddened by the departure of this illustrious human being”.