Janos Starker, master of the cello

Published 5:00 am Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Janos Starker, one of the 20th century’s most renowned cellists, whose restrained onstage elegance was amply matched by the cyclone of Scotch, cigarettes and opinion that animated his offstage life, died Sunday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88.

Indiana University, where he was a distinguished professor of music, announced his death.

A Hungarian-born child prodigy who later survived internment by the Nazis during World War II, Starker appeared, in the decades after the war, on the world’s most prestigious recital stages and as a soloist with the world’s leading orchestras. He was part of a vaunted triumvirate with Gregor Piatigorsky (1903-76) and Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), collectively the most celebrated cellists of the day.

He was also widely known through his more than 150 recordings, including one of Bach’s six suites for solo cello for which he won a Grammy Award in 1998.

Starker played several magnificent cellos during his career — including the “Lord Aylesford” Stradivarius of 1696, a 1707 Guarnerius and a 1705 instrument by the great Venetian maker Matteo Goffriller — but nonetheless managed to resist the seductions of the instrument to which cellists can fall prey.

Unlike many acclaimed string players, Starker used a lean, judicious vibrato — the minute, rapid variations in pitch by the left hand that can enrich a note’s sound but can also border on the histrionic. Excessive vibrato, he liked to say, was like “a woman smearing her whole face with lipstick.”

While the musical style that resulted was too dispassionate for some critics’ taste, others praised Starker’s faultless technique; purity of tone; clean, polished phrasing; and acute concern with the composer’s intent. His style was especially well suited to the Bach suites, canonical texts for the instrument, which he recorded on several occasions.

“The technical aspects of Starker’s playing are so wholly merged in the solution to problems of interpretation and style that the listener tends to forget how much technical mastery the cellist has achieved,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times in 1962, reviewing a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The pitch is unerringly right, the tone is mellow without being mushy, difficult leaps and runs are manipulated with the easy unobtrusiveness of a magician.

Although Starker eschewed romantic mannerisms, he did not stint Romantic works: He gave many well-received performances of the Dvorak concerto, the lush, haunting B minor staple of every concert cellist’s arsenal.

Nor did he neglect 20th-century music: He was considered one of the foremost interpreters of his countryman Zoltan Kodaly’s sonata for solo cello, composed in 1915 and so technically demanding that it is sometimes described as having been written by a fiend.

In these works, too, his restrained approach differed greatly from the ripe romanticism of Rostropovich and Piatigorsky.

“What I’d like to see is a little more humility and dignity displayed toward our art, and less self-aggrandizement,” Starker said of Rostropovich in a 1980 interview with People magazine. “Slava is more popular, but I’m the greater cellist.”

Opinion was but one area in which Starker allowed himself joyful immoderation; cigarettes and alcohol were others. He adored Scotch and by his own account consumed it with abandon. For much of his life he smoked 60 cigarettes a day, although in old age he reduced the number to 25.