Documentary celebrates Beaux Arts 50th anniversary

In an interview for the Indiana Daily Student two years ago, Menahem Pressler, distinguished professor of piano for the IU Jacobs School of Music, said he did not expect his chamber music ensemble to have much longevity.\n"I expected it to last a week to make a record," Pressler said.\nBut much to the joy of chamber music lovers everywhere, Pressler's prediction was anything but accurate, as the ensemble, known as the Beaux Arts Trio, has now practiced and performed for half a century. This 50-year mark is currently being celebrated by the PBS documentary "Beaux Arts at 50," which was broadcast Monday. \nThe documentary features performance footage from the trio's 50th-anniversary concert at IU's Auer Hall from summer 2005 as well as interviews with the three ensemble members. The trio consists of British violinist Daniel Hope, cellist Antonio Meneses and pianist and founder Pressler.\nWhen asked to explain the group's longevity, Pressler tells the camera it must have to do with the satisfaction the music gives the audience and the members of the trio.\n"Pleasure is really the wrong word," he says in the movie. "In music, it is more than pleasure. It is the satisfaction of feeling filled. ... It is the search for that indefinable thing we call inspiration."\nThe inspiration for the 50th-anniversary concert came from Ludwig van Beethoven. The ensemble performed his trios at its debut concert in 1955 at the Berkshire Music Festival, now called the Tanglewood Music Festival\nEmphasizing the group's return to the repertoire of its birth was an integral part of the documentary, executive producer Steve Krahnke says on WTIU's Web site.\n"I think it is important for audiences to understand that, in some ways, music is both a historical artifact to be studied, but also an expression of new ideas," Krahnke said, according to the WTIU Web site. "The trio performed the Beethoven trios as its first public concert 50 years ago -- they've performed them since -- yet they are still discovering new meaning in each movement."\nOne of the more entertaining moments of the program is footage of the ensemble discovering this meaning together during a rehearsal in Auer Hall. Viewers have the chance to watch the members of the trio work through the subtleties of a group trill and witness them employ a method as elementary as counting beats aloud. But for a few moments, the audience is given a rare glimpse at the intimate level of collaboration required to produce the kind of effective, nuanced performances that have kept the Beaux Arts Trio at the top of the chamber music world for five decades.\nPressler summed up the ensemble's rehearsal method with a line from Irving Berlin's musical "Annie Get Your Gun": "Anything you can do, I can do better."\n"We try to better each other," Pressler says in the documentary.\nWTIU will rebroadcast "Beaux Arts at 50" at 3 p.m. Sunday. DVD and VHS copies of the hour-long program are also available for purchase at the PBS shop Web site, www.shoppbs.org.