Mercury are justly
proud of the recordings they made in
the early stereo epoch and are now
enabling us to hear them as never before.
Though I have heard this only in its
CD form, this recording has range, depth
and definition that are truly amazing,
with every detail of Dvořák’s orchestral
score (and what a lot of detail it has!)
heard as, quite frankly, never
before, yet all sounding quite naturally
balanced with the solo cello. If it
had been sent to me as a recording made
in the last year or so, I don’t think
I would ever have suspected otherwise.
Compared with other early stereo accounts,
for example the Rostropovich/Boult/EMI
(the cello sounds fine but the orchestra
is congested) or the Hoelscher/Keilberth/Telefunken
(a beautiful performance ruined by the
backward placing of the orchestra though,
again, the cello sounds well), this
is in another league.
This is all to the
good, of course, but since recordings
made during the last year or so also
sound like recordings made in the last
year or so, and sometimes contain excellent
performances, the question of the actual
interpretation still matters.
Dorati begins rather
slowly and ominously, and I kept expecting
him to whip things up, but no, he concentrates
on a broad, majestic interpretation,
with much expressive leeway at the famous
horn theme, too much to sound really
natural. It is due to his keen ear,
of course, as well as to the recording,
if many details are uncovered which
are often passed over, but the lack
of real momentum is a considerable price
to pay. He also tends to emphasize the
obvious, and both after the opening
ritornello and the orchestral passage
which ushers in the development, his
preparation for the soloist sounds pedantic
("listen", you almost hear
him saying, "the soloist is going
to enter soon") and robs the music
of its adorable spontaneity.
And what happens when
the soloist does enter? Well, as we
know, Starker is a fine cellist and
musician, and of course everything is
finely played, but there is not a great
variety of tone and he too has quite
a lot of points to make. There is plenty
of very romantic-sounding rubato,
but in the last resort I didn’t really
warm to it, finding it more an intellectual
analysis of romanticism than the real
thing. Starker and Dorati between them
seem to want to present a darker, more
sombre Dvořák than usual and, while
it is always interesting to hear
a great work in another light, to hear
this composer rigorously shorn of all
that makes him lovable is a little depressing.
At the start of the finale Dorati seems
to want to suggest that this music might
have influenced the opening of Mahler’s
6th symphony – the homely
world of Bohemian dance is left far
behind.
I have always remained
loyal in this work to Rostropovich with
Boult; though Rostropovich is very free
in his expression, Boult somehow manages
to keep the overall structure in view,
as was not the case with the great cellist’s
more indulgent later partners, from
Karajan onwards.
The Bruch leaves me
in a similar quandary. It sounds
like a performance with all the
right romantic gestures, but music is
not just about sound, and a performance
can sound right while feeling wrong,
which is what this one does to me. The
Tchaikovsky is very neatly played, but
perhaps Starker’s rather intellectual
approach is best suited to earlier and
later music.
Christopher Howell
Janos Starker (cello) 
MERCURY
SACD 475 6608 [63:48] 
