Mstislav Rostropovich--RIP

[jim stone]

My heavens, what a life!

I think there really is a Russian soul.

80http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070427/ap_on_en_mu/obit_rostropovich

Excerpts from an AP article.

"The passing of Mstislav Rostropovich is a bitter blow to our culture," said author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sheltered by Rostropovich during his bitter fight against Soviet authorities in the 1970s.

"He gave Russian culture worldwide fame. Farewell, beloved friend," Solzhenitsyn said, according to ITAR-Tass.

A bear of a man who hugged practically anyone in sight, "Slava" Rostropovich was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world's greatest cellist. He was an effusive rather than an intimidating maestro, a teacher who nurtured Jacqueline du Pre among many other great cellists.

"He was the most inspiring musician that I have ever known," said David Finckel, the Emerson String Quartet's cellist who studied with Rostropovich for nine years. "He had a way to channel his energy through other people, and it was magical."

Rostropovich's opposition to the Communist leaders of his homeland started with the denunciations of his teachers, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev during the Stalin era.

In the early 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev's regime, Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, allowed Solzhenitsyn to live in their dacha when Soviet authorities were pressuring the author for his dissident writing.

After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote an open letter to the Soviet media protesting the official vilification of the author.

"Explain to me please, why in our literature and art (that) so often, people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word?" Rostropovich asserted in the letter that went unpublished.

"I know that after my letter there will be undoubtedly an 'opinion' about me, but I am not afraid of it. I openly say what I think. Talent, of which we are proud, must not be submitted to the assaults of the past."

The couple's fight for cultural freedom resulted in the cancellation of concerts, foreign tours and recording projects. Finally, in 1974, they fled to Paris with their two daughters. Four years later, their Soviet citizenship was revoked.

After arriving in the West, "he was like a little boy, laughing, shouting, pinching himself to make sure these really were the streets in Paris," the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalled in the 1996 book "Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later."

Still, exile took its toll on Rostropovich's soul.

"When Leonid Brezhnev stripped us of our citizenship in 1978, we were obliterated," Rostropovich recalled in a 1997 interview in Strad magazine. "Russia was in my heart — in my mind. I suffered because I knew that until the day I died, I would never see Russia or my friends again."

Indeed, he was unable to attend Shostakovich's funeral in 1975.

But in 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, Rostropovich showed up with his cello and played Bach cello suites amid the rubble. The next year, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and he made a triumphant return to Russia to perform with Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 1977 to 1994.

When hardline communists tried to overthrow then-President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Rostropovich rushed back to Moscow without a visa and spent days in the Russian parliament building to join those protesting the coup attempt.

Ever the bon vivant with a big smile and twinkling blue eyes, he was known for his love of women and drink.

"He is a passionate man and he has a real lust for life, and his marriage is stronger because of it," his daughter Olga said when asked by the Internet Cello Society in 2003 about his love for the five Fs — "fiddles, food, females, friends and fodka." "What they have together is very precious and nothing can destroy it."

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan. His mother was a pianist. His grandfather and father, Leopold, were cellists. One memorable photo shows him as an infant cradled in his father's cello case. He started playing the piano at age 4 and took up the cello at about 7, later studying at the Moscow Conservatory.

"When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice — my voice," Rostropovich told Strad magazine.

He made his public debut as a cellist in 1942 at age 15, and gained wide notice in the West nine years later, when the Soviets sent him to perform at a festival in Florence, Italy. Life magazine reported the 24-year-old "stirred the audience to warm applause." The New York Times critic said his music was "first class. His tone was big, clean and accurate. ... His musical style seemed to be ardent and intense."

He developed close musical relationships with contemporary composers, inspiring some 100 works, from Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten — as well as from some not-so-famous composers.

During the 2002 AP interview, he spoke about Shostakovich, who endured part of the Nazis' siege of Leningrad and battled for individual expression under Stalin.

Suffering is essential for art, Rostropovich said. "You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life. If he (is) only happy with his life, I think that he (does not fully) understand what is happiness."

Rostropovich's work for humanity didn't stop with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he and his wife established the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation to help to improve the health care of children in former Soviet lands.

[chas]

Damn, Jim, I posted a thread about this at the same time (I deleted mine). Here's Slava playing the first movement of the Dvorak concerto:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxYbF-Yzdf0

He was my favorite cellist, but he was a lot more than a cellist.

[Cynth]

[jim stone]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ud3BvW2MAj4

[CHasR]

an era has ended

[cowtime]

They did a tribute on the classical station I listen to every morning so I heard him for several hours today. He was amazing.

[jim stone]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ

Another absent genius. Astonishing.

[Wombat]

I have a double CD of Rotropovich playing Bach's cello suites—very close to my favourite cello music.

An amazing musician.

[Chiffed]

I have a double CD of Rotropovich playing Bach's cello suites—very close to my favourite cello music.

An amazing musician.

He may be the only musician ever to make the Bach suites sound passionate and sexy.

I raise a glass of peppery vodka.

[chas]

They did a tribute on the classical station I listen to every morning so I heard him for several hours today. He was amazing.

Is that WVTF? It's been 15 years since I lived where I could get WVTF and I still miss it.