Antônio Meneses was 10 when he and his four brothers were recruited for the Rio Municipal Theater Orchestra. Their father, a French horn player in Rio de Janeiro, decided that his children should play string instruments to increase their employment odds.
By the age of 24 Mr. Meneses had exceeded his father’s expectations: He had won two major international cello competitions, including the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and was on his way to making recordings of Brahms and Richard Strauss with Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. He was later recruited by Menahem Pressler to become the last cellist in the late 20th century’s greatest piano trio, the Beaux Arts Trio.
Mr. Meneses, who became one of his generation’s premier cellists and an important figure in the musical life of his native Brazil, died on Aug. 3 in Basel, Switzerland. He was 66.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his agent, Jean-Marc Peysson. The Brazilian news media said the cause was brain cancer.
With his serious, concentrated playing, his singing tone, his sure technique and his absolute dedication to the musical text, Mr. Meneses marked himself as a musician’s musician.
He was sought after by conductors like Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado and Andrew Davis, and by recitalists like the great Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires, with whom he recorded Brahms and Schubert, as well as the pianist Cristina Ortiz, his compatriot, with whom he recorded a memorable Villa-Lobos disc.
The serene, pure line he produced in “O Canto do Cisne Negro” (“Song of the Black Swan”) on that recording is characteristic, unfussy and lyrical at the same time. These were the qualities that stood out to Mr. Pressler, according to Mr. Peysson, Mr. Meneses’s agent, who sometimes traveled with him.
“Meneses has an infallible technique, a sound of special beauty and a search for musicality that make him an artist like few others,” Mr. Pressler once said of him. (Mr. Pressler died last year.)
He was an ideal partner in chamber music, those who worked with him said, because of his understated, modest qualities. “He had a solidity, a certainty, a musical faithfulness,” Mr. Peysson said in an interview. “When something was in place” after a rehearsal, “he respected that. His colleagues were always reassured. He wouldn’t try new stuff.”
In interviews, he made it quietly clear that he was the music’s servant, not the other way around. “It’s not the instrument itself,” he said with mild exasperation in 2013 to a Romanian television interviewer who was waxing lyrical about his cello prowess before a performance of the Elgar cello concerto. “It’s just something that you use to produce music.”
Mr. Meneses left his homeland at 16 to study in Germany with the great Italian cellist Antonio Janigro, and he lived for the remainder of his life in Europe. But he often returned to Brazil, where his brothers were all professional string players, fulfilling what he called his father’s “dream” for the family. There he had a commanding presence as a champion of both Villa Lobos and new works by Brazilian composers, and as an international star.
“The thing that struck me about him was his care with the sound,” the composer João Guilherme Ripper, the former president of the Brazilian Academy of Music, said in an interview from Rio de Janeiro. “There was a kind of perfectionism about him.”
In New York, he was especially appreciated for helping to rejuvenate the Beaux Arts Trio, which had already been in existence for more than 40 years when Mr. Meneses joined it for its final decade in 1998.
“He makes a fine singing line, slim in a way that is appropriate to the trio repertory, and absolutely sure,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in December of that year in The New York Times in a review of the reconstituted trio’s debut. He commended Mr. Meneses for his insight into the Ravel trio, “playing the opening of the passacaglia as if it were real Baroque music, with minimal vibrato, evoking the sound of the viola da gamba.”
If critics sometimes faulted Mr. Meneses for being too careful and precise — “The phrasing was not unmusical, but the playing lacked expressive variety and long-line plasticity,” Donal Henahan wrote in The Times of his New York Philharmonic debut in the Schumann cello concerto in 1987 — his technical command was never in doubt. The music press generally reviewed his recordings warmly.
“He manages to maintain a thoughtful elegance and unfussy control that brings out the innate beauty of the music at the same time as displaying the multifarious elements of his own artistry,” the critic Caroline Gill wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2015 of “Capriccioso,” an album of solo works. Rob Cowan, writing of Mr. Meneses’s recording of the Kodaly solo cello sonata in the same magazine the next year, said that “every technical trick in the cellist’s book” was “pulled off with panache.”
Antônio Jeronimo de Meneses Neto was born on Aug. 23, 1957, in Recife, in northeastern Brazil, the oldest son of João Jeronimo Meneses and Rivanice Vieira de Meneses. His father played in the Rio Municipal Orchestra and was first horn in Rio’s opera house orchestra, and Antônio was given a child’s cello before he had reached adolescence. By the age of 14 he was playing with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Janigro, on tour with the orchestra, heard him play and brought him to Düsseldorf to study.
In 1977 he won first prize at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, Germany’s major classical music competition, and in 1982 his performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations won him the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Mr. Meneses later joked that he received the award at the whim of a “bureaucrat” who commented that the way was clear for him because “the U.S.S.R. had no diplomatic disputes with Brazil.”
His career took off after that, and Karajan soon recruited him for recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Mr. Meneses retired from concert life abruptly in July after his diagnosis, and he died less than a month later. He is survived by his wife, Satoko Kuroda; a son, Otávio, from his first marriage, to the Filipino pianist Cécile Licad; and three brothers, Eduardo, Ricardo and João. His other brother, Gustavo, a violinist, died in 2021.
“I usually get close to the works long before I actually start learning them,” Mr. Meneses told his biographers, the Brazilian journalists Luciana Medeiros and João Luiz Sampaio, according to the newspaper O Globo. “It’s a kind of courtship, which for me is very important for an intellectual and spiritual familiarization with it.”
Read More: Antônio Meneses, Lyrical Brazilian Cellist, Is Dead at 66
