János Starker Remembrance Week: Reminiscences from the Starker Studio

Cello-playing aside, Starker’s intelligence, force of personality, and personal discipline were intimidating to most people, and downright frightening to students.  Our culture generally allows our geniuses and high achievers to be self-indulgent and immature outside of their field of endeavor, but Starker lived out his ideals and principles at all times (that we could see).  This discipline made him virtually bullet-proof as a cellist.

During my two years in Bloomington, I carried a relatively light course load, as I wanted to observe as many lessons as possible.  I was in MA 155 many mornings when he came in, looking tired and/or hungover, needing coffee, and not wanting to hear anything too loud.  The student would play for awhile, and Starker would listen as long as he could before had to stop him/her, get out his cello, and teach.  He would tighten his bow, put down the ubiquitous cigarette, make some remark about what was missing in the music, and then it was as if he pushed the “play” button on a CD player.  His very first notes of the morning flowed out perfectly, whether it was the Prokofiev Sinfonia Concertante, the Kodaly Sonata, or the Rococo Variations.  No warm-up, no stretching, no quick scale – just music, rendered without fuss or difficulty of any kind.  This could be inspiring or depressing, depending on one’s personal make-up.  But I have never seen another instrumentalist with such in-your-face mastery of every frightening corner of the repertoire, able to toss off any passage at any time without any preparation.

The vignette that, to me, most vividly illustrated the gulf between Starker and ordinary cellists happened in a Saturday class.  The piece being played was the Paganini “Moses” Variations; a work he recorded, and loved to torture his students with, but did not perform.  He was demonstrating and talking at the same time (another ability that set him apart from everyone else), and came to a big shift, which he missed slightly. In two years of watching him play, for dozens of hours each week, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he missed a shift, so this was a fairly big deal.  His reaction was negligible, in the moment, but astounding the more I thought about it later.  He didn’t break stride in his speech, but he flipped his bow, looked searchingly at a spot on the hair, and immediately resumed playing. I asked several people afterwards if they’d noticed what he did, and no one had; the moment went by too quickly.  Trying to unpack that brief instant, many times in my head, I became almost disoriented.

Starker always stressed integration; how the hands should work together, and how often the problem apparently in one actually originates in the other.  And he showed how, to really solidify a shift, one had to coordinate the speed of the left hand (slow or fast) precisely against the bow-speed, which obviously needed to be consistent.  But in that moment of the Paganini, his bow must have skidded slightly, perhaps because of a spot with some finger oil, or where rosin had worn away unevenly.  And that tiny “skid” threw off his left hand, which depended on absolute, pre-set consistency of bow-speed.  This moment, fleeting as it was, vividly illustrated how he had the science and craft of the instrument fixed at such a microscopic level.  I felt I’d unlocked something (not that I was ever able to approach that level myself).

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He could be cold, even harsh, but this usually only happened when he felt a student hadn’t been paying attention, short- or long-term.  We all have “Starker stories” about how he left this or that student in tears.  But it’s just that he would not tolerate laziness of any kind, and felt that if he wasn’t telling/showing the student what was wrong (thus offering the pathway to improve), he was wasting time.  Behind this grim persona, however, was a very, very funny man.  He could find humor in almost any situation, and was a brilliant raconteur.

As students, we only caught glimpses of this, because he did maintain a fairly strict wall; he was not interested in being our buddy, and he knew that the intimidation factor was certainly a motivator.  If you had a lesson that week and your friends wanted to party, you calculated the equities and rewards very carefully.

But he often expressed humorous, unvarnished thoughts.  Once a student brought in the Delius Concerto, a piece which always makes me think of Mark Twain’s description of the Book of Mormon: “chloroform in print.”  The student offered Starker a copy of the score, and began playing.  Starker almost immediately stopped him to say that what he was playing wasn’t in the score.  The student apologized, saying that there were two versions of the work, and he was playing the one with cuts, but that the score was the other version.  Starker replied “any cuts in Delius are welcome.”  He then let the student just play, for several pages, during which he was an expressionless sphinx, not moving a muscle other than to bring the cigarette to his lips. All of a sudden his phone rang, at which the student of course stopped.  Starker looked at me, sitting over in the corner, and said “my prayers have been answered.”

One of the classic Starker put-downs came in the form of a riddle.  If a student was playing “defensively” – simply trying to not mess up – without any meaningful music-making, Starker would ask, “do you know how porcupines make love?”  If the student hadn’t yet heard this one, he/she would get the deer-in-the-headlights look, until Starker brought it home: “Very carefully.”

The single most devastatingly-effective teaching tool he used (and it was always in a public class) was also the funniest: Starker would simply imitate the student’s playing.  His powers of mimicry were equal to his cello playing, and never was the truism “a picture is worth a thousand words” more vividly applied.  Really, sometimes we nearly killed ourselves laughing at the spectacle; he so perfectly caught the tension, the fumbling, the anxieties.  And it always got instant results.  Then, one day, it was my turn.  I thought my Rococo wasn’t bad, but when he showed me what Varation I looked like, and the class erupted in laughter, I thought “what the hell is so funny?  I don’t look like that at all!”  But, of course, I did, and I realized later in the practice room that he had in essence given me everything I needed to clear out the blockages.

My final anecdote is from a vignette I put up on the Starker Tribute Page on Facebook when he passed away:

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Many of you know the terror we students felt in his Saturday classes. If you were going to play, you spent the week sweating.  Everyone tried to sign up to play first, since no one wanted to sit there and watch the carnage visited upon those who went before you; but he didn’t tolerate prima donnas, and expected everyone who played to be present the whole time.

            So when I was careless enough to delay signing up, and was the last victim this one particular day, I knew it would be a morning from hell.  Each of the three who played before me were quivering puddles of goo by the time he was done with them, and then he simply looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and proceeded to get a fresh cigarette as I set up, trying not to actually shake as I did so.  My Schumann Concerto was prepared in one sense — I knew it pretty well, and Gary had helped me with it already — but in the crucible of his gaze (and ears) it all but fell apart.

Since he was on a roll, having torn down the previous three players, I knew that what would happen next would be even less pretty than my performance.  But perhaps he was winding down a little, or he could smell my fear.  His teaching was brusque and pointed, but I think he realized that I didn’t need to be made to feel any worse about myself than I already did, and he confined his remarks to the immediate musical issues.

Then, near the end, he remembered one more point he wished to mention, and said “please start on the third page.”  I don’t retain music visually, and it had been some time since I’d looked at the part (and hadn’t brought it).  I kind of froze, trying to think of what he meant.  He then sang the phrase in question, with a little edge of “duh!” in his voice.  I will never know why, but I then exclaimed “oh, you mean the DEVELOPMENT section!”  The class erupted in nervous laughter, as though I’d “gotten” him, and I again froze, waiting for the hammer to fall at what I realized was a pointless, smartass comment.

Starker waited for the laughter to subside, took another drag on the cigarette, regarded me with a smirk, and said “that’s the difference between you and me, Bob; you are a musician and I’m just a cellist.”  The class of course laughed even harder, and the mood changed.  I don’t remember what the last musical point then was about, but I remember that I fixed it to his satisfaction; perhaps the only such point that day.  A master teacher/mentor at his finest.