David Moses Presler grew up in Brooklyn, singing in the shul choirs of Leon Berger until his voice changed at the age of twelve — and, as he tells it, "boy did it change." The boy soprano became a rich bass-baritone with a high extension, and a life in sacred and secular song began.
He dedicates his work to the memory of his father, Rabbi Bernhard Presler — Harav Dov Be'er ben Yosef — who gave him a love for hazzanut, led services in the Catskills, and carried a tape recorder to every cantors' convention, building a library of cassettes that became a young cantor's conservatory.
A cantor, and much more
Over the years David has served Conservative congregations for some forty seasons, as a hazzan, concert artist, opera singer, voice teacher, conductor, composer, recording artist and pianist. He trained formally at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in Music Education, and pursued advanced graduate study in Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University, where his doctoral research focused on Jewish music education — a field he helped define.
His teachers form a lineage he is proud of: two decades of hazzanut with the legendary Cantor Noah Schall; bel canto with Cantor Avshalom Zfira; and opera with Richard Crittenden and other master teachers in New York.
Opera house and concert hall
Audiences know David's rich baritone from the opera stage — Figaro, Leporello, Escamillo, Don Giovanni — and from recitals of the great song cycles, Winterreise and Dichterliebe among them. As a concert artist he has performed art songs, arias, Broadway favourites and jazz standards in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Russian. In South Florida he gave some thirty concerts a season and sang with Palm Beach Opera and Florida Grand Opera; his "Light Up the World with Music" tour brought twenty-five concerts to senior homes up the East Coast.
Jerusalem
David made aliyah in the summer of 2021 and lives in Jerusalem. He teaches voice at the Machon L'Hazzanut, sings at the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem and is a requested performer at the Bet Tovei Ha'ir senior community. He has appeared with the Yuval Ensemble at Heichal HaTarbut in Tel Aviv, in La Bohème in Haifa, and in Eilat with Kolot Min HaShamayim — and he tours a beloved evening of Yiddish song, in Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian, under Israel's National Authority for Yiddish Culture.
Passing it on
In 2020 David founded Chazanut.org, the "Official Site of Chazanut," and has since produced more than a hundred instructional videos to help hazzanim worldwide learn nusach and the great cantorial works. He conducts the choir Mizmor L'David, has composed over a thousand liturgical settings, and recently completed a ten-year labour of love: publishing the final Shabbat works of his teacher, Noah Schall. He was given Congressional Recognition for his contribution to American music — but ask him what matters, and he will talk about a single phrase of prayer, sung slowly enough to mean something.