Janos Starker

In Mark Salzman's 1994 novel The Soloist, the protagonist--a child cello prodigy--decides to make music his life's work after hearing a concert by the legendary cellist Janos Starker. That boy could've been Hamilton Cheifetz.

The Portland State University professor of music and Florestan Trio cellist was himself a child prodigy who grew up listening to recordings by his idols Starker, Pierre Fournier and Pablo Casals. Yet he had a distinct advantage over Salzman's character--he was able to study with the legend. "When I first played for Starker in 1966," says Cheifetz, "I played the Prelude of the Sixth Bach Suite. When I finished he asked me, 'If an angel should come down and ask you what do you want to do with your life, what would you say?' I immediately said, 'I'd like to be like you.'" From that statement of an eager 15-year-old, Cheifetz went on to work with Starker for two-and-a-half years and has kept in touch ever since. "What young musician wouldn't want to be one of the world's greatest concert artists?"

The Budapest-born Starker is internationally known as one of the cello's finest soloists and educators. After emigrating to the United States in 1948 to hold the principal cellist chair in Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Starker went on to establish himself as arguably the finest cello stylist of the time. His clarity of intonation, minimal vibrato and elegant ease of playing convey a supreme emotional control and are the polar opposite of the passion play of, say, a Jacqueline du Pré.

Yet it's as an educator that Starker may end up best remembered. As Distinguished Professor of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, he has taught hundreds of cellists their craft over the years and built the school's music program into one of the world's finest. Cheifetz is a prime example of his success. "Every day I teach, I'm telling my students the same things that he taught me," says Cheifetz, and that sense of artistic lineage promises an immortality that outlasts recordings.

On his PSU visit, Starker will not only offer a master class to six lucky cello students, but he'll invite Cheifetz and seven other local cello luminaries to share the stage with him on cello octet arrangements of Fresobaldi's Toccata and Couperin's Pièces en Concert. But it's Cheifetz who will truly share the spotlight when the two perform a pair of cello duos by Luigi Boccherini and Starker's countryman David Popper.

It's not the first time Cheifetz recalls being put on the spot by his former teacher. "After I'd listened in on his class on that first visit," Cheifetz remembers, "Starker surprised me by announcing to his students that a guest from Chicago was here. He turned to me and said: 'Why don't you play the Bach Prelude?' I had no idea I was going to have to play to them, yet I nervously got out my cello and played. When I finished Starker said, 'It's nice to know there's good
cello playing going on somewhere besides Bloomington.' It was a fantastic benediction for me."