János Starker - Zoltán Kodály: Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello, Duo for Violin & Cello / Bottermund-Starker: Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1987)

When he was a boy, Kodaly taught himselfwith virtually no professional guidance-to play the piano, the violin and the cello, partly in order to take part in domestic music-making (his father, a station master employed by the Hungarian state railways, was an amateur violinist, his mother sang and played the piano), and his chamber music for strings all dates from relatively early in his working life, between 1905 and 1918. It includes three major works that feature the cello in a virtuoso capacity: the Sonata for cello and piano, Op. 4(1909-10), the Duo for violin and cello, Op. 7 (1914) and the Sonata for solo cello, Op. 8 (1915). The two latter works provide the substance of this record: the Solo Cello Sonata (dedicated to Jen6 Kerpely, the cellist of the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, which had a long and distinguished career pioneering new works between 1910-when they performed the first quartets of Bartel( and Kodaly-and 1946, when they gave the Hungarian premiere of Bartok's Sixth Quartet), which plays for over half an hour, stretches the resources of the instrument to their utmost and is without question the finest work for solo cello since the suites that Bach had written some two hundred years earlier; and the Duo, an almost equally demanding piece of comparable length, which antedated Ravel's Sonata for the same instruments by five years.
Janos Starker, as Nancy Perloff's note tells us, first played the Solo Cello Sonata to the composer in 1939 when he was 15 and still a student at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, and he did so again on several occasions after he had settled in the USA in 1948, when Kodály was on conducting tours in the States. Shortly before his death in 1967 the composer said to Starker: "If you correct the ritard in the third movement, it will be the Bible performance". He has recorded it four times: in 1948 in Paris on 78s, with a few cuts in the second and third movements, partly made in order to accommodate the work on eight sides; in 1950 in New York on LP, with most of the cuts restored; in 1956 in London, in the same form; and in 1970 in Japan, with all the cuts restored. It is this later recording which is now issued in a digital transfer on CD. The performance is electrifying - "Biblical", if you like - and has an air of authority about it that the otherwise very impressive version by Yuli Turovsky, rightly praised by AS, cannot quite equal.
Similar qualities distinguish the performance of the Duo Sonata, recorded in Indiana in 1973, in which Starker is joined by Josef Gingold: a pupil of Ysaÿe, orchestral leader for Toscanini and Szell, and a revered and legendary pedagogue (since 1960 a colleague of Starker's on the music faculty of Indiana University). The virtuosity and bravura of their playing is matched by an instincive feeling for the varying moods of the music and its pacing that is not approached, let alone equalled, by either of the alternative versionsYuli and Eleonora Turovsky (Chandos) and JeanJacques Kantorow and Mari Fujiwara (who couple it—on Denon—with the Sonata by Ravel)—fine though they are in their own ways.
Ideally, one would like to have Kodaly's Sonata for cello and piano as the third work on the disc, but that would probably be too long a programme for one CD. Instead, Starker offers, as an hors d'oeuvre, a sizzling account of his own 'transcription' of eight variations from an unspecified number made by the German cellist Hans Bottermund (born about 1860, and principal cello of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for many years) on the celebrated 24th Caprice by Paganini which, we are told, he came across when he was "about twelve", and has played as an encore but never recorded before, until he made this recording in 1978 in Japan.
The Delos recording is throughout extraordinarily lifelike: the occasional audible page-turn emphasizes the impression one has that players and listeners are in the same room. -- Gramophone