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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Renowned Russian cellist dies


Russian conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, shown in 1987, died Friday in Moscow. 
 (File Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Chris Pasles Los Angeles Times

Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist and conductor considered by many to be one of the finest virtuosi of his instrument in the last half of the 20th century, has died. He was 80.

Rostropovich, who became a global political figure in the 1960s after the Soviet Union stripped him of his citizenship for protesting Moscow’s suppression of the arts, suffered from intestinal cancer. After initially being hospitalized in Paris, where he had a home, he returned to Russia in February. He died Friday in a Moscow hospital.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, speaking at a news conference Friday, extended his condolences and added, “This is a tremendous loss for Russian culture.”

Music lovers prized Rostropovich for his readily identifiable strength and beauty of tone. British cellist Steven Isserlis called him an “irresistibly powerful musician with an energy that can ignite an audience.” Listening to him, Isserlis said, “one feels that it is as if his life depends on each note – it is the urgency of his commitment that is so riveting.”

At the same time, he earned praise for greatly enlarging his instrument’s repertory. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has estimated that Rostropovich premiered and in many cases commissioned perhaps a third of the works making up the core of the cello repertory.

Rostropovich’s connection with Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich – who wrote two cello concertos for him – was particularly close. “He was the most important man in my life, after my father,” Rostropovich told the New York Times in 2006. “Sometimes when I’m conducting, I see his face coming to me. Sometimes it’s not really a happy face. I conduct maybe a bit too slow, so I conduct faster, and the face disappears.”

He also had close friendships with Soviet composer Serge Prokofiev and British composer Benjamin Britten, who wrote the solos in his “War Requiem” for Rostropovich’s wife, Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.

Rostropovich left a legacy of many recordings, spanning his entire career, including cello concertos and works by Dvorak, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Haydn and Bach.

To millions of Russians and others around the world, he became an iconic freedom fighter as well. Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1990, said of Rostropovich that “he took a stand for the basic truths of life, and he did not compromise.”

A burly, emotional man, fond of giving generous bear hugs and kisses, Rostropovich was affectionately known by the nickname Slava, which means “glory” in Russian, and he already was an internationally renowned cellist in 1974, when he was still in his 40s. But in that year, he and his even more famous wife left the Soviet Union after four years of restricted concert activity and harassment because they had sheltered dissident novelist and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The National Symphony in Washington, D.C., was among many orchestras that offered the couple support after their arrival in the West, and following an acclaimed debut conducting the orchestra, Rostropovich became its music director in 1977. A year later, he and Vishnevskaya, whom he had married in 1955, lost their Soviet citizenship for being “ideological renegades.” He held the National Symphony position for 17 years.