The renowned Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses has died at the age of 66. On July 7 it was announced that he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and he immediately retired from performing and teaching.

Meneses was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1957, the eldest of five brothers, all of whom were string players. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro before moving to Europe to study with Antonio Janigro in Düsseldorf and later in Stuttgart. He won first prize in the ARD International Competition in Munich in 1977 and first prize and gold medal at the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

An acclaimed soloist and chamber musician, Meneses performed with leading orchestras and with conductors including Claudio Abbado, Herbert Blomstedt, Semyon Bychkov, Riccardo Chailly, Sir Andrew Davis, Herbert von Karajan, Riccardo Muti, André Previn, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Kurt Sanderling, Yuri Temirkanov and Zubin Mehta. He gave solo recitals in venues such as London’s Wigmore Hall and was a guest at major festivals in Edinburgh, Lucerne and Aldeburgh. Meneses was a member of the Beaux Arts Trio from 1998 to 2008 and performed regularly with pianists Menahem Pressler and Maria João Pires.

Among Meneses’s first recordings, in the flush of his Tchaikovsky Competition success, were major projects with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic for DG: Brahms’s Double Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter (9/83) and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (8/87). DG also released a recital from Wigmore Hall with Maria João Pires (12/13). Meneses’s longest association on record was with Avie, for whom he recorded much of the core cello repertoire, from Bach’s Cello Suites (12/04) to Brahms’s Cello Sonatas with Gérard Wyss (9/22).

He was also a strong advocate of Brazilian music and recorded the complete works for cello by Heitor Villa-Lobos with Cristina Ortiz and, released in 2023, Villa-Lobos’s cello concertos and Fantasia for cello and orchestra with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (Naxos). Meneses commissioned many works from Brazilian composers, including in 2009 when he asked six Brazilian composers to write pieces inspired by Bach’s Cello Suites.