Janos Starker dies: Leaves legacy as Grammy-winning cellist

Janos Starker dies: A renowned cellist, Janos Starker survived a Nazi concentration camp and became a world-class musician and teacher.

Grammy Award-winning cellist Janos Starker has died after months of declining health. He was 88.

Alain Barker, a spokesman for the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, said Starker died Sunday at his Bloomington home in the presence of family members.

Starker won a 1997 Grammy Award for best instrumental solo performance for a recording of Bach cello suites.

Starker made his professional debut at 14. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1948 and played for the Dallas Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chicago Symphony before joining Indiana University in 1958.

In an NPR rememberance, Starker said teaching was his calling.

"I've been caught confessing that basically I was born to be a teacher," he said. "People question the validity of it, because I played all those 3, 4, 5,000 concerts in my life. But the fact is, I think I was put on earth to be a teacher."

The New York Times wrote of Starker: "The chief hallmark of his playing was a conspicuous lack of schmaltz. Effusive sentiment is an inherent risk of the cello, with its thundering sonorities and timbre so like the human voice. He also shunned the dramatic head tossing and body swaying to which many cellists incline.... Unlike many acclaimed string players, Mr. 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 said, was like “a woman smearing her whole face with lipstick.”

He was born to Jewish parents in Budapest on July 5, 1924, and spent three months in Nazi concentration camps.

Survivors include his wife, Rae, and two daughters.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Janos Starker dies: Leaves legacy as Grammy-winning cellist
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0430/Janos-Starker-dies-Leaves-legacy-as-Grammy-winning-cellist
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe