Word: conductor
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...Bernstein program, and the composer had dedicated the overture to Rostropovich by way of acknowledging his arrival in Washington. The music was called Slava!, which is not only the Russian word for glory but Rostropovich's nickname, and it was a good way for the conductor to show Washington that he is as gifted with jazz as he is with Tchaikovsky. Rostropovich caught the spirit easily, bending his body into the music, shafting his cues with a vigorous baton, sculpting the shapes of sound with his left hand, now kneading, now pleading, now punching his fist to bring home...
...there is a long march ahead. Says his close friend, Violinist Isaac Stern: "Slava knows that there are certain elements of the classic repertoire that he still has to grow into. He will not pretend that he can match the 30 or 40 years of experience of any master conductor...
...place himself on a pedestal higher than the podium. Herbert von Karajan once broke up a rehearsal when he spied a musician chewing gum. Szell was a tyrant. Toscanini's men loved him, yet trembled before his baton-snapping temper. "Sometimes," says Rostropovich in his near-impenetrable English, "conductor says to orchestra, 'You play for me and my ego!' No. Orchestra must not think conductor is god. Some day he is running quick to bathroom, then orchestra says, 'There go god with diarrhea.' I, with my work, make service for our most important god?music. I tell them...
...debating point, and perhaps unresolvable. Admiringly, Conductor Seiji Ozawa says that "Slava I doesn't interpret, he feels. His music is really his character. He is conducting his life." His performances of the Schubert Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano and the Schumann Cello Concerto are typical. The phrasing and pastels of dynamics in the Schubert expose a bold lyricism that would have astonished?but probably pleased?the composer. As for the Schumann, Leonard Bernstein, who recorded the piece with Rostropovich, confesses that he would just as soon not do it again in quite the same fashion. "Slava takes enormous freedoms...
...days in a row without sleep. Some years ago, during a hectic concert tour, he sat down on a stage to play the Dvorak Cello Concerto and fell asleep during the orchestral introduction. Startled when his cue came, he whispered to the conductor: "You played that so magnificently that I was spellbound. Please start again...