Rostropovich

[rojo]

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich (March 27, 1927 – April 27, 2007)

I thought this was an interesting article about the man.

*Edit: Link removed; non-operational.*

Anyone have any favourite recordings by this fine cellist? Or interesting stories about him?

[janny108]

I read some stuff about him at classical music news. I think with your link you have to have access to the NY times?
Jan

[rojo]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, jan. Weird; when I read the article, one didn`t need to have access to the NY Times- that page didn`t even show up, the link went directly to the article. Maybe there`s some kind of time limit or something. Darn. I`ll try to find something else then.

Btw, for anyone wondering what the article said, (from memory,) it referred to Rostropovich`s contributions to the cello repertoire, in the sense that he inspired many composers to write pieces for the instrument, (and himself.)

[rojo]

Here`s an article from BBC news-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6598895.stm

[NEB]

I once had the great pleasure of being in the orchestra for him playing the Dvorak. A real treat that still resonates in my ears many years later.

[Andrew Roussak]

One of the amazing features of Mstislav Rostropovich was the rare ability to learn by heart the new material in the very short terms - which made it possible for him, to be the very first performer of a great number of the new concerts and sonatas, written by Russian and western composers.

It is very well known that Rostropovich was a close friend of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Solzhenitsin. Rostropovich was a merry and open-hearted man, a heart and soul of the company; he could easily improvise a speech on any occasion.

I once heard on the radio, how the cello concerto of Shostakovich, written especially for Rostropovich, was performed for the very first time. They played it together in the Moscow flat of Shostakovich, whereas the composer played the orchestral score as a piano accompaniment. Having finished this, the both were very excited; they congratulated each other and marked the expected success of a newly born masterpiece drinking a little bit vodka together. Then they repeated the performance, which was now even better. They raised a toast once again and played the concerto one more time, whereas Shostakovich tended more and more to improvising rather than following the score, and Rostropovich sometimes found himself playing by heart the excerpts from another pieces of his repertoire...

Rostropovich loved Russia with all his heart but, in the same way as Rachmaninov, Nabokov, Nuriev, was just unable to conform his private life to the standarts ordered by the Soviet regime. In the beginning of 70-s, he gave a shelter to a dissident writer Alexander Solzhenizin. After it , Rostropovich together with his wife Galina Vishnevskaya was compelled to leave the country himself. In 1978, he was deprived of the Soviet citizenship - it was returned to him only in 1990 by Mikhail Gorbachev.

On 19. 08. 1991, the communist headliners had made their last attempt to seize the power in the USSR . Having seen a reportage about it on a TV, Rostropovich rushed to the airport ( he was in Paris that time ) and in the evening of the same day he was in Moscow, together with those who defended the Parliament House. His short speech from there was aired live by the only still functioning Russian TV-channel and then several times repeated - and I still can remember it. Rostropovich took a Kalashnikov machine gun from one of the soldiers and said: " I hate the weapons and never thought I would even touch this ugly thing. But today, I'm proud to be among those, who fight for the freedom and democracy of my country".

Rostropovich was a player of the highest technical and creative level a man can only attain. His life was not all the time easy, but it was wonderful and sparkling. He marked his own era in the music of the 20 Century - like Rachmaninov, Richter, Gould, Ashkenazi. I wonder if the future generations of musicians will think and speak of him in the way we speak of Paganini today.

God may bless his soul and the long memory of him.

[Ouled Nails]

Thank you Rojo and Andrew. The world has just lost a giant and I just didn't want to reply to Rojo's overture if nobody else did. (Where are the Danish classical music lovers, anyway!). No website dedicated to classical music can respond silently to this great master's passing -- if it does, it simply is not a website for classical music lovers. Sorry to be so forceful here but would any culture remain silent if one of its greatest heroes had died? The likes of Rostropovich, in my most sincere opinion, cannot be matched by current performers. The world has recently lost one who among performers is the equivalent of its most outstanding composers.

Silence? NOT!