Britten wrote a cello library for Slava
Mstislav Rostropovich, born 27 March 1927 in Baku, turned the cello into a commissioning engine as much as a solo voice. Benjamin Britten dedicated a sonata, three suites, and a symphony to him. A 1974 human-rights prize matched advocacy that complicated Soviet standing before his 2007 death.
His father Leopold, a cellist, had studied with Pablo Casals, and his mother Sofiya was a conservatory pianist who started him on piano at four; cello lessons with his father began at eight. The war moved the family from Baku to Orenburg and, in 1943, to Moscow, where at sixteen he entered the Conservatory under his uncle Semyon Kozolupov, with Shostakovich among his teachers. He won gold in the first Soviet young musicians' competition in 1945 and a Stalin Prize at twenty-three.
No cellist has enlarged the repertoire more: he inspired and premiered over 100 works. Myaskovsky's Second Sonata, premiered together in 1949, prompted Prokofiev's sonata and Symphony-Concerto; Shostakovich wrote both cello concertos for him. Benjamin Britten gave him a sonata, three solo suites and the Cello Symphony, and Dutilleux, Lutosławski, Penderecki, Berio and Messiaen followed. He married Bolshoi soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in 1955 and took up conducting in 1962.
Politics shadowed the music. At 21 he quit the Conservatory in protest when Shostakovich was dismissed under the 1948 decree against formalist composers, and he later smuggled the manuscript of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony westward. On 21 August 1968, the day Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia, he played Dvořák's concerto at the Proms and raised the score aloft. Sheltering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970 brought official disgrace and touring bans.
He left for the United States in 1974, lost his Soviet citizenship in 1978, and led Washington's National Symphony Orchestra from 1977 to 1994. He played impromptu as the Berlin Wall fell, flew into Moscow in August 1991 to stand beside Boris Yeltsin, and died in 2007, a month after his eightieth birthday.
Source: Mstislav Rostropovich
