Not in my count of summers has there been a more beautiful performance on a moonstruck lake front than Janos Starker’s of Dvorak’s Violoncello Concerto. In fact, indiscreet as it may sound, I think it must have been the most eloquent performance I have heard Mr. Starker play. If so, that is as it should be. The brilliant young cellist just left the Chicago Symphony orchestra to strike out on a solo career, and Wednesday night’s appearance with Milton Katims and the Grant Park Symphony orchestra marked his first Chicago step on that ladder a man climbs alone. It seemed to me that he took it, if not with new authority, with new boldness, brilliance and sweep. This was, quite simply, a great performance.
Since we have known him, Mr. Starker has always had superb technique, a patrician purity of line, a supple outpouring of silky tone. He had another valuable thing, which is not so much reticence as reserve. These have not altered. But there has newly come into his playing the command of the man who has stepped out and taken over. It is the quality that is flung out from performer to audience like a great arch of communication. It is in some indescribable sense a two way cross. Artist and audience meet in the middle…
Into that big, fragrant Bohemian concerto Mr. Starker poured the glory of tone, the bite of authority, the dark rapture of song, the proud edge of nationalism. He even did a little discreet conducting with his head, perhaps on prearrangement with Mr. Katims and that baffling problem of getting a complex concerto ready with one rehearsal. In any case, the orchestra gave him its finest playing, with spurts of light and flickers of fire. It was a pity that conditions of outdoor amplification made impossible that special orchestral splendor of the Dvorak, its damask bloom.
Yes, there were other things, hard as it is to remember. For one of them, a well organized, well played Beethoven Fourth. But the moon, like the rest of us, came to hear Starker play the Dvorak Concerto.
