János Starker - Telegraph János Starker was born in Budapest on July 8 1924, the son of a Polish-Jewish tailor named Sándor and his Ukrainian wife, Margit. János, who was named after the hospital where he was delivered, was soon acclaimed as a child prodigy. By the age of seven, the same year in which he was presented to Casals, he was studying at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. He was only eight when he took on his first pupil, a promising six year-old, and at 14 he stepped in at a few hours" notice to perform the Dvorák Cello Concerto. Hearing Emanuel Feuermann on cello accompanied by Bartók was a revelation to Starker: this, he said, was how the cello should be played. During the war the Germans sent him to a labour camp on Csepel Island in the Danube where, he recalled: "I was an electrician, I repaired roofs, I defused bombs, you name it." He and his parents survived the Holocaust, but his brothers Tibor and Ede, both violinists, perished. Afterwards he became first cello of the Budapest Opera. In 1946 Starker made his way to Paris, where he won the Grand Prix du Disque with his first recording, the Kodály Sonata for solo cello - a work that was widely regarded as unplayable but which he had mastered before the war. He also entered the Geneva Cello Competition, but lost out to one of his own students. The conductor Antal Doráti encouraged him to go West, and in 1948 he joined his fellow Hungarian émigré in Dallas, picking up a quixotic Hungarian-Texan form of English. At first he took on orchestral work, leading the cello sections of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (1948-49) and the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera New York (1949-53) under Fritz Reiner and George Szell. While there he was asked by Dimitri Mitropoulos to audition for the New York Philharmonic, but Starker refused - saying the conductor should come to hear him. When Reiner moved to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Starker accompanied him, though they fell out spectacularly when Starker missed a cue during the final rehearsal for his farewell concert and Reiner threw his baton at the cellist, which snapped. Later his fellow cellists gave Starker a tie pin shaped as a broken baton. A year-long appointment as artist-in-residence at Indiana State University, Bloomington, in 1958 gave Starker a secure base for the first time. He now pursued an international career as a top-flight soloist, while students from around the world made the pilgrimage to be inspired by his passion for the cello. Soon he was appointed Professor and would remain associated with the university for the rest of his life, claiming that his longevity there was directly related to the music department's proximity to the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. By the time of his first British recital at the Wigmore Hall, in 1956, accompanied by Lívia Rév, Starker's reputation had preceded him. Critics spoke of his "unruffled musical eloquence" and the "technical ease of his bowing, fingering and tone control." The following year he played the Elgar Cello Concerto at the opening of the Edinburgh Festival with the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. His Proms appearances were limited to just three occasions: 1956, 1957 and 1962, on the latter two of which he played Strauss's Don Quixote with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent. Starker received honours from institutions around the world, while among more than 160 recordings his 1998 account of Bach's solo cello suites for RCA won a Grammy Award in 1998. His teaching book, An Organised Method of String Playing for Cello (1965), is widely used, while his memoir, The World of Music According to Starker (2004), was amusingly written with the same heavily accented voice with which he spoke. On a practical level he invented the Starker Bridge, which is used by many cellists today to enhance the tone of their instruments; it was described by Time magazine in 1966 as "a major innovation in 300 years of instrument making." János Starker had a daughter by his first marriage to Eva Uranyi, from whom he was divorced. He is survived by his second wife, Rae Busch Goldsmith, whom he married in 1960, and by their daughter. János Starker, born July 8 1924, died April 28 2013