Mstislav Rostropovich:Mstislav Rostropovich, who has died of cancer at the age of 80, was not only the best-known, most-loved and most widely recorded cellist of his time, but also a fearlessly outspoken advocate of individual and artistic freedom in the Soviet Union of the 1970s.
His support for the proscribed writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, widely publicised in the West, led to official travel restrictions that, for a time, severely curtailed his international career.
And his continued public criticism of the Soviet authorities caused the revocation of his Soviet citizenship and that of his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in 1978. His citizenship was restored in 1990, and in 1991 he once again appeared in the political limelight, when he travelled to Moscow to support Boris Yeltsin against a hardline communist putsch.
He was born into a musical family in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1927. His father had studied with the great Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals, and was himself a teacher at the Gnesin Institute. Rostropovich's own studies at the Moscow Conservatory included composition with Shostakovich and Shebalin as well as cello under Semyon Kozolupov.
He engaged with contemporary music from an early age, coaxing Prokofiev to revisit his languishing Cello Concerto, Op 58, and transform it into the Symphony Concerto, Op 125, and later premiered both of the cello concertos of Shostakovich. He also collaborated with the composer Dmitry Kabalevsky to complete the cello concertino Prokofiev left unfinished at his death in 1953.
After winning a string of competitions he became one of the earliest Soviet performers to conquer the West in the 1950s, and his association with Benjamin Britten from 1960 onwards led to a stream of new cello works from the British composer.
The premiere of Britten's Cello Symphony was given in Moscow in 1964 during a four-month period in which Rostropovich also premiered concertos by Henri Sauguet, Lev Knipper, Boris Tchaikovsky, Lubomir Pipkov and Tikhon Khrennikov. His apparently insatiable musical appetite led him to feats like the performance of 30 works by 24 composers in an eight-concert series in London in 1967. He gave the first performances of important concertos by Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, and Schnittke, and in the 1990s turned his attention to less well-known figures, including Giya Kancheli, Alexander Knaifel and Renaud Gagneux.
Ten years ago, in a set of CDs celebrating his 70th birthday, he recorded the Grand Duet, which the uncompromising Galina Ustvolskaya, a favourite pupil and sometime mistress of Shostakovich, had written for him in 1959. He was making amends for not having dared to perform the piece during his years in the Soviet Union: "To have done so," he explained, "could have led to her expulsion from the union of composers, or even to her arrest."
He also inspired composers he had never met. The great Argentinian master of nuevo tango, Astor Piazzolla, wrote Le Grand Tango for Rostropovich in 1981. The cellist neglected the work for years, but then chose to play it for the composer in Buenos Aires, with some suggested changes, before performing it in public.
The generosity of spirit represented by his wide embrace of challenging new music was reflected in his approach to the standard repertoire, which he played with a gorgeously large tone and in a manner that was sometimes criticised for being too freely emotional.
As a conductor, a role he first took up in the 1960s, he was even freer. "I never studied," he said, "but I had the best teachers," referring the long list of great conductors with whom he had collaborated.
He was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington in 1977, and guested regularly with some of the world's great orchestras. In 1978, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, he conducted the first recording of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera that famously upset Stalin in 1936 and won its composer a notorious put-down in Pravda. He also conducted the premieres of Alfred Schnittke's operas Life with an Idiot (1992) and Gesualdo (1995).
Rostropovich was a skilled pianist, and frequently accompanied his wife in recitals and recordings. His appearances in Dublin included performances of the Bach solo cello suites at St Patrick's Cathedral, recitals as both cellist and pianist (with Vishnevskaya) at the National Concert Hall, and a 1988 appearance at the same venue, playing three concertos in a single programme.
He received a Stalin Prize in 1951, and was also widely bestowed with national honours and honorary degrees in countries around the world. He was an important teacher (he was appointed professor of cello at the Moscow Conservatory in 1956), gave many series of master classes, and organised the first Rostropovich International Cello Competition in Paris in 1981.
His non-musical work includes a foundation set up in 1991 "to improve the health care of children in the Russian Federation and other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union" with the focus on vaccine-preventable diseases and HIV/Aids. The impact of his passing will be felt well beyond the confines of the musical world. He is survived by his wife and two daughters, Olga and Elena.
Mstislav Rostropovich, born March 27th, 1927; died April 27th, 2007