Big Cello

When Gregor Piatigorsky put away his cello for a long rest 15 months ago, he was the best cellist in the U.S.* Back in Carnegie Hall last week for the first time since his sabbatical, a slightly greyer "Grischa" Piatigorsky proved that there is still no one around who can touch him.

Carrying his $30,000 Stradivarius cello like a toy, the hulking (6 ft. 3 1/2 in.) master lunged onstage, plunked himself into a chair next to the piano. Then he launched into a program of Schumann, Bach, Milhaud, Debussy, Bloch and Ravel. He played them all with masterful technique and taste, though he was at his best when the music called for soaring rhapsody. All in all, he played with the freshness of a man who had taken time out to think things over.

Fifteen months ago, Piatigorsky was fed up with the hotel, train and plane life of the touring virtuoso. It occurred to him that he had not taken a real vacation since the age of eight, when he got his first job as a cellist. At 46, he wrote his manager: "I have carried my big cello from city to city. I have never refused an interview, even to a school paper. I have seen everybody after a performance who wanted to see me. For a while, I can stop."

He spent his sabbatical puttering around the garden of his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, renewing his acquaintance with his wife, the former Jacqueline de Rothschild, and two children, and he finished a philosophical novel whose hero is a painter. He also found time during the summer to teach at the Berkshire Music Center.

Was he glad to be back in the thick of it again? The answer was an epic shrug and a Slavic expostulation as follows:

"I have this recording to do. I think I must be fresh, at my best. But I cannot sleep. Someone gave me sleeping pills. I never take pills, never! But I take a pill--and I am wide awake. So I take another and I begin to feel drowsy. And I get mad. To think that that little pill, that so little pill, can dominate me! ME!"

In short, Piatigorsky was back, and bubbling.

*Best in the world: Pablo Casals, who came out of his retirement briefly last year for the Bach festival at Prades (TIME, June 12).

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