János Starker :: Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello: III. Allegro molto vivace
Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello is obscenely, tortuously hard to play. Which means that it is performed, frequently, as a show-piece — a big ‘here I am’ — a pronouncement of “yes, I’ve disciplined myself to this point. Yes, I can grind away this hard. And no, you can’t believe that I am one person, that this is one instrument.” And, of course, you can listen to it that way. But like most virtuosity-proving pieces, this one is more than technically astonishing. It is truly, unreally gorgeous when someone really plays the shit out of it.
So this is János Starker playing the living shit out of the last movement. Starker, at least in my opinion, is the greatest living, smoking, boozing, old school, eastern bloc badass classical musician. I watched him teach a master class with a cigarette hanging from his bow-hand the whole time (ashing irreverently onto his Stradivarius) — then heard him refuse, the next year, to give a master class because the building insisted on enforcing its non-smoking policy (in the end they bent the rules for him). The thing is, the way Starker plays Kodály is just so brutal and so perfect — there’s still a tender ache under the pizzicato, but there’s that unabashed dirtiness, too, that wailing. Whew. Those Hungarians.
Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello: III. Allegro molto vivace
János Starker (cello.org)
Zoltán Kodály (wikipedia)
mark said on friday, may 02nd, 2008
Poppy said on friday, may 02nd, 2008
As a hungarian, I feel proud to be associated with such a commentary, which is of course a ridiculously arrogant stretch. Also as a hungarian, I feel compelled to make an inscrutable, crude comment involving animal anatomy at this time. Don’t worry, I have a cigarette hanging from my gesturing hand, and a jigger of homemade liquor in the other.
joshua said on thursday, may 08th, 2008
Thanks for taking the leap into classical Jenny. This is crazy great and that story is brilliant.
Gorgeous. Starker is something else. I’ve always thought he was the sexiest cellist around—and I’ve never even heard this. Holycrapshit. The movement around minute 6 is insane!