Word: starker
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Oddly enough, after the radiator was silenced, Starker at last began to play with the feeling that had been absent before the delay. The orchestra seemed ragged after the discouraging episode, but Starker opened up, singing his notes instead of merely stating them with technical flawlessness. In the final moments of the third movement rondo, Starker gave the audience what it had been waiting for all night...
CELLIST JANOS STARKER plays with superlative technique: his fingers range the cello fingerboard unerringly while his bow arm sails from one string to another, never straying or accenting incorrectly. But the highlight of Starker's appearance with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra Friday night, the Dvorak cello concerto in B minor, demands not only precision but also sensitivity, which the world-renowned cellist was either unwilling or unable to furnish...
...best symphony in the world, and no one expects it to be. But this does not excuse their frequent drowning out of Starker. The acoustics of Sanders Theater leave much to be desired, but HRO is no newcomer to Mem Hall. Conductor James Yannatos was lax in regulating the orchestra's volume...
...resulted in a superb flute performance in Stravinsky's Petrushka and then abysmal, brittle, out-of-tune music from the flutes and oboes in the Dvorak. The sloppy wind performance in the cello concerto obscured a strong effort by the strings to match at least partially the virtuosity of Starker...
However, the worst offender of the night was neither Starker nor the HRO, but a Sanders Theater radiator which released a cacophonous blast of steam during the contemplative, yet simple adagio ma non troppo of the Dvorak. As the heating unit entered the final stage of its five-minute protest, Starker remarked, "Seldom have I been so rudely interrupted. Perhaps this indicates that Harvard needs a concert hall." That conclusion is indisputable, in light of the radiator interruption and the police sirens and car horns which consistently violated passages played at or below the mezzo-piano level...