LA JOLLA -- At SummerFest '99 last night, Janos Starker played the Bach
Suite No.  3 in C Major as if he owned it, and of course he does.  It was
a restrained/free, unsentimental/singing, straightforward/passionate
performance, a keeper.

In Sherwood Auditorium, the wonderful concert hall overlooking an
improbably blue ocean, in a museum with the world's second-best spectacular
location (nothing beats San Francisco's Legion of Honor), there is a
weekend-long celebration of Starker's 75th birthday, and the Bach was one
of a series of memorable events.

When this morning, festival directors David Finckel and Wu Han arranged a
meeting with Starker, I had two questions to ask him -- why did the Gigue,
the final movement, sound different from the rest of the performance and
from his usual interpretation; and why, after playing the work for 60
years, does he use the score? I felt awkward about the second question, so
asked only the first, but Starker replied by bringing up the business about
the score immediately as if reading my mind:

"You might have noticed that, contrary to the mores of concert life today,
I use music to play Bach.  It's not because I don't know the notes or I am
worried about a memory lapse.

"I will never forget what Fritz Reiner told me when I was first cellist
of the Chicago Symphony, and he was conducting the `Eroica.' He had a
phenomenal memory, conducted rehearsals of just about everything from his
head, but came the evening, and the performance, he put the score up and he
was turning pages.  It didn't make sense to me at the time, in the era when
the memory wizards came around, careers being made from conducting the
`Rite of Spring' from memory -- and I asked Reiner why he is using the
score.  He said:  `When I look at the music, it gives me new ideas.'

"This is precisely what I am doing today.  When I look at the music, I
keep changing the performance.  Instead of making an echo-effect in one
bar, I play it in two bars.  I differentiate when I repeat something from
the second time.  Let's now do the more Germanesque version of the Gigue
instead of the light one like at the beginning of the suite.  This depends
on acoustics, for example, if there is a reverberation in the hall -- it's
the split personality of the performer:  one who says what to do and the
other who listens.

"One reason I am against playing without music in a group [switching
from the topic of the Bach suite] is that sometimes you begin to play in
a linear fashion [Starker might have meant "mechanically"], your part, not
the totality of the work.  My attitude has always been that I am one member
of the community, I am the protagonist when I am playing a concerto, but I
have only one part of the whole.  Composers seldom write for the cello --
they write *a* concerto (unless it's Boccherini who was a cellist), they
hear either vocal sounds or [generic] instrumental sounds.

"Now, as to the Gigue last night, I sometimes joke about the last movement
getting faster because you're hoping to get to the Scotch bottle.  You
say it sounded more `free' than the rest, and that's where the music
 [the score] helps in that you can `improvise' more, you can take greater
chances, you have greater freedom of varying your performance.  You're
right, it was totally different from any of my recordings...  and that's
what one hopes, that after playing it hundreds and hundreds of times, you
can still find new ideas -- that's why Bach is a treasure hunt in a whole
lifetime.  You look for hidden treasures, and sometimes in the middle of
the concert, you say:  `How come I never thought of that?!'

"Mind you:  you have to reach a certain age, a certain experience, a stage
that you can afford the luxury of looking for new things.  But then that's
what keeps one alive musically, artistically."

Tonight, the birthday celebration continues, as Starker plays the
Frescobaldi Toccata (in the Gaspar Cassado arrangement) with a dozen
cellist colleagues and former students.

Janos Gereben/SF
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