Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses, gold medalist in the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition, has died in Basel, Switzerland on August 3, 2024. He was 66.
He was receiving palliative care since the first week of July after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer. At the request of the late cellist, there was no funeral.
He was visiting soloist of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra along with Cecile Licad at the CCP in the late 80s to the mid-90s. Together, they had well-received outreach concerts in Bacolod, Cebu, Tagaytay, Zambales and Antipolo City, among others.
Apart from CCP engagements, he was also heard at the Manila Metropolitan Theater in the late 80s also with Licad.
They had a son, Otavio, now in his 30s.
Heard at the CCP in the late 80s with Licad, Meneses was one of the most acclaimed soloists and chamber
musicians of his generation.
Born in 1957 in Recife, Brazil, he was the eldest of five brothers, who were all string players. He was raised
in Rio de Janeiro and went on to live in Europe for much of his youth after being asked to join the class of Italian cellist Antonio Janigro, whom Meneses met at the age of 16, in Düsseldorf and later in Stuttgart.
Before becoming Tchaikovsky Laureate, he also won a top prize in another major competition — 1977 ARD
International Competition in Munich, Germany.
Other than the PPO, Meneses has performed with the world’s leading orchestras and has worked with
conductors including Claudio Abbado, Gerd Albrecht, Herbert Blomstedt, Semyon Bychkov, Riccardo Chailly, Sir Andrew Davis, Charles Dutoit, Neeme Järvi, Mariss Jansons, Herbert von Karajan, Riccardo Muti, André Previn, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Kurt Sanderling, Yuri Temirkanov, Zubin Mehta and Daniele Gatti.
He was also heard in recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall.
As a chamber musician, Meneses was a member of the Beaux Arts Trio from October 1998 to September 2008 and performed regularly in duos with pianists Menahem Pressler and Maria João Pires.
Meneses has recorded extensively throughout his career and made two recordings for Deutsche Grammophon with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic: Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Brahms’s Double Concerto with violinist Anne-Sophie Mütter.
Also with Deutsche Grammaphon, he released The Wigmore Hall Recital, his first recording with pianist Maria João Pires, in September 2023.
I met Meneses after he got married to Licad in the mid-80s.
With Meneses, my late cello education started at close range.
During our outreach concerts in Baguio, Cebu, Bacolod and Antipolo, Meneses introduced me to his Pablo Casals cello then on loan to him at the time.
Meneses explained to me what was special about the Casals cello: “It is actually a much-stronger instrument with more possibilities for the soloist. It has such a penetrating sound and I imagine that is one of the reasons Casals liked it so much. It can rise about the sound of an entire orchestra which is not a normal thing with the cello.”
When Licad and Meneses opened my First International Music Festival in Baguio City in 1988 along with tenor Otoniel Gonzaga, I remember that we went back to the Hyatt Hotel without the Pablo Casals cello after a sumptuous meal from Cafe by the Ruins. We were so overwhelmed by the food we forgot we had a super-expensive cello with us. The cello was still there when we frantically went back to the Cafe. If it got lost, I would have died figuring a program of sonatas for cello and piano without the latter and Meneses would have paid millions for a lost collector-item instrument owned by Casals himself.
After that marriage (which lasted all of 10 years), there was no way I could avoid the cello. My concert programming which consisted mainly of piano sonatas and piano concertos (for pianists) and operatic arias (for singers) now expanded a little bit to include pieces for cello namely the Bach Suites (solo unaccompanied pieces), the Haydn, Schumann, Elgar and Dvorak cello concertos, among others.
More outreach memories with Meneses.
I remember they performed for the Tantoco couple Bienvenido and Gliceria “Glecy” Rustia-Tantoco (the parents of Nedy Tantoco) and later performed in a fundraising concert for typhoon victims of Catanduanes in the mid-90s.
Relatively good pianos await Licad wherever she goes concertizing but do cellists have that luxury?
Nope. They carry their own instruments most of which are twice or thrice expensive as the pianos.
To top it all, you have to buy a separate seat just for that non-breathing passenger. For the cellist of Meneses’ stature, it had to be first-class!
As Meneses was using the cello of the greatest cellist of all time, Pablo Casals, assigning the instrument in the baggage compartment was out of the question.
Just a few hours of the announcement of Meneses’s death, hundreds of renowned musicians, musical institutions, and fans from across the world have expressed their condolences on social media.
A lifelong advocate for Brazilian music, Meneses also recorded the complete works for cello by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. In 2017, Meneses invited Brazilian composer and pianist André Mehmari to record a CD celebrating his 60th birthday, mixing classical and Brazilian popular music
As an educator, Meneses gave masterclasses across the world, and was a professor at the Bern University of Arts from 2008 to 2023. He was also a teacher at Siena’s Accademia Musicale Chigiana and Cremona’s Accademia Stauffer.
Other cellos he used aside from the earlier Pablo Casals cello was a 1710 Matteo Gofriller cello, another one by Luiz Amorim and Filippo Fasser and a Baroque cello by Fabrice Girardin.
In one of his last interviews with Strad, he pointed out the importance of balancing personal life with music.
He pointed out: “In this profession it’s so important to balance your life as well as you possibly can. Stress is the enemy of the travelling soloist, and often it’s the travelling that makes things stressful. It’s so much better if you can give yourself time to relax, arriving well before the first rehearsal. When I was younger, I’d take an early flight on the day of the performance and another one straight back the following morning, but now I’ve realized the importance of having room to breathe. Soloists used to take the whole summer to rest and work on repertoire for the next season but today you spend summer racing between important festivals, which isn’t very healthy. It felt much more human when things moved more slowly.”
In one outreach concert in Cebu, Meneses asked me if I have insurance, a regular job and other things that
comes as a regular employee.
I said I have no insurance, no regular job (except the freelancing writing), no health coverage, etc.
“How do you live?” he asked me.
I replied with a shrug, my way of saying I live for music regardless of its financial consequences.
After an outreach concert in the Pundaquit festival venue in San Antonio Zambales in 1995, I broke house
rule by ordering a case of beer after the concert. In the middle of which Meneses raised a toast, “To Pablo who has no insurance and regular job, to life!”
A CEO of a recording company remembers Meneses thus: “Antonio was special. With grace and aplomb, his supreme musicality shone through his seemingly effortless virtuosity. He was a consummate gentleman,
generous colleague and a truly great artist. We will miss him dearly.”