Music Review: Janzer Concert
Starker ‘Concertolio’ among gems at Eva Janzer Memorial Concert

It still seems strange not to have Janos Starker on stage to play in the annual Eva Janzer Memorial Concert, the 28th of which took place in Auer Hall Thursday. But a couple of seasons ago, he decided to forgo public performance.

At last year’s concert, a highlight was a retrospective of his illustrious career. At the 2007 affair, Starker was very much present again, one is happy to say, this time welcoming the audience, then listening and, finally, as co-concocter of the concert’s closing number, the origin of which he explained.

He used to offer orchestras a lengthy list of concertos he was prepared to play, he told the audience, from which conductors could choose the one to feature him in. That could lead to a nightmare, imagined even if not real, of coming to the concert hall and not remembering which work had been chosen. The notion prompted Starker and his former student, now faculty colleague, Emilio Colon, to fashion something called “Concertolio,” an extended, very creative and delightful pastiche of themes and variations from perhaps a dozen famous cello concertos, among them those of Dvorak, Elgar, Schumann, Boccherini, Haydn, Vivaldi, Britten, Shostakovich, and Strauss, if memory and recognition serve this listener well.

The performers of this collection: the Indiana Cello Ensemble, meaning a stage full of IU cello students (44, according to the list on the printed program), energetically led by cellist/co-composer/conductor Colon. The performance was most pleasing to the ears. Just consider the beauties of the cello sound so multiplied.

All of which is not to deprive the others on Thursday’s program of their rightful praise. The concert opened with a Mozart arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in F Minor, played with conviction and beauteous resonance by violinist Jaime Laredo, cellist Sharon Robinson and violist Michael Tree.

They were joined by three more IU Jacobs School faculty members — violinist Federico Agostini, violist Ik-Hwan Bae, and cellist Colon — for a fervent performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence,” a sometimes dreamy, often dazzling exposition meant to reflect the composer’s memories of that Italian city but garnished with a definite overlay of Slavic colors. The six musicians gave it a high-powered yet polished reading.

Starker’s beloved colleague, Eva Janzer, was, thus, fittingly remembered, and, as always with these annual affairs, money was raised for scholarships to cello students in the school.

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The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.