Word: starkers
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...years people have asked Cellist Janos Starker to name the piece he most enjoys performing. "The one by Brahms -if only he had written it for cello," was the virtuoso's reply. He was referring, he would explain, to Opus 78, the G Major Sonata for Violin and Piano, an introspective work tinged with Nordic melancholy. "It is the most glorious Brahms," says Starker, "and it has been the dream of all cellists some day to be able to play it." No one, however, dared transcribe the violin work for cello, but early this year a transcription by Brahms...
...midst of the mess with a TV going in the corner, and I happened to hear a cellist playing the Brahms violin sonata," recalls Buchbinder, 27. Elated, the young Austrian pianist contacted Marcus and obtained a photostatic copy of the score. Three weeks ago he sent it to Starker, and arrangements with Ravinia were made...
Like many composers, Brahms was in the habit of making transcriptions, mainly to double his royalties, although he often concealed his authorship in a pseudonym. This transcription is unsigned, but it carries the unmistakable stamp of the master. No one but Brahms would have dared change the key, Starker points out - an inspired musical per mutation that illuminates the cello's lower register and exploits the instrument's mellow color and timbre. The composer also made some 200 alterations, mostly minor, in the score which he probably recast for his friend, the eminent 19th century cellist Robert Hausmann...
Earlier in this century, composers rarely featured the cello, considering it a lowly second cousin to the violin. Artists like Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky, Mstislav Rostropovich and Starker revealed the silken tonal beauty of the instrument. Still, the repertory remains narrow. Starker speculates that this Brahms sonata, written in the year of the composer's death (1897), may have been his last work. In any event, his publisher died soon after. With the decline of the firm, copies of the Brahms sonata may have been overlooked until at last the so nata disappeared from view...
...stroke; in Stockholm. The rebellious son of devout Lutheran peasants, Lagerkvist was enchanted with the Fauvist and Cubist artists of pre-World War I Paris. After experimenting with expressionism in a host of early, pessimistic poems and plays, Lagerkvist, who described himself as "a religious atheist," later developed the starker, more realistic prose style necessary to his vision of humanitarian idealism. In the U.S., he was best known for The Dwarf (1945), a bitter, allegorical novel about human greed, and Barabbas (1951), an enigmatic tale of man's struggle to achieve religious faith...