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Janos Starker died today, Sunday, April 28, at age 88 at his home in Bloomington, Indiana.
At 14, he substituted for another musician, on six hours' notice, in the Dvořák Cello Concerto. He had only one request at the time: "May I use the music?" A year later, he was performing the purportedly unplayable Cello Sonata by Zoltán Kodály, a work for which Starker eventually won France's prestigious Grand Prix du Disque in 1957. The composer described Starker's performance of his composition to Mr. Pressler as "'the bible.' And Kodály was not easy," Mr. Pressler added.Starker had a less auspicious account of Kodály's initial reaction to his interpretation of the sonata. "After [my] concert, while I was still responding to the ovation," he wrote, "Kodály was the first to speak to me. 'First movement, too fast. Second, OK. Third, don't separate too much the variations.' I hadn't noticed as yet that they were variations," he admitted.
Once, during his tenure at the Met, Eugene Ormandy was conducting and, wrote Mr. Starker, "His well known habit of expecting maximum body gyration from his players became evident. For a lifetime I have been known to use minimal body motions. My section and I played fortississimo [very loudly] but with no swaying, and Ormandy kept gesturing toward me for more and more. Finally I asked him if there was anything wrong. 'Oh,' he said, 'I am so accustomed to my great Philadelphia cello section.' That rubbed me the wrong way. I said, 'Mr. Ormandy, you don't have a better section than us. However, we sit to your left while Philly sits on your right.' He was at a loss for words. . . . The next day he wrote a letter complaining about lack of cooperation." Ormandy carried a dislike for the cellist to his last days.
"Playing with Reiner," he once said, "you learn something new at every rehearsal." He still wears as a souvenir of Chicago days a tiepin given to him by the members of his section to commemorate an event of the last season. Reiner, who had been as close to Starker as he ever permits himself to be with an employee, had paid public tribute to his retiring first cellist shorly before a performance of the Verdi Requiem. At the final rehearsal, however, Starker forgot to count during a passage for unaccompanied sopranos, and came in, loudly, a bar too soon. Reiner gave him an infuriated look and threw his baton violently to the ground, where it snapped. Some time passed before the two men made it up, and in the interim the section bought Starker a gold tiepin in the shape of a broken baton.
