János Starker Plays Hindemith, Prokofiev & Rautavaara

Album review

A very rich piece from the SWR archives, this austere record, already published in 2014 shortly after the death of the performer, will delight many fans of the great Hungarian cellist Janós Starker. Conducted by Ernest Bour and Michael Gielen, the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden Orchestra (today known as the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra) was one of the main vectors for contemporary music in Germany, a veritable bastion of the Western musical avant-garde.
The discovery of this record is surely the Cello Concerto No.1 by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, which is often overshadowed by the Second which he would write 40 years later. Composed in 1968, it is almost subversive in its deliberately neoclassical writing which harks to the musical language of the 19th century, with a few modern touches.
Written in 1940 for the romantic, virtuoso playing of Gregor Piatigorsky, Paul Hindemith's Cello Concerto, the third, if we count the works of his youth and his Kammermusik n° 3, is one of the first works that the composer wrote at the start of his exile in the USA, after fleeing the Nazi regime. In 1950, Prokofiev would write a cello concerto for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, which he would swiftly revise and entitle Symphony- Concerto. It's odd to think of the unbridled virtuosity that the work demands of its performer.
And sure enough, the great János Starker plays these three works from the first half of the 20th century, each so aesthetically distinct, with a sovereign mastery, an unfailing intonation and a beauty resounding across all registers. He wasn't given to romantic emphasis: he could be wrongly accused of a certain chill, while his lyricism was, on the contrary, radiant and never excessive. © François Hudry/Qobuz