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 [log in to unmask]