Word: conductors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Rome Correspondent Erik Amfitheatrof went back-stage at the Stadt Casino in Basel to seek out Mstislav Rostropovich, this week's cover subject, the famous Russian cellist-conductor gave him a joyous greeting. "My uncle Massimo is a concert cellist," says Amfitheatrof, "and when I introduced myself to Rostropovich, he cried, 'Your face is like Mass-eemo, and Mass-eemo is my dear friend.' It was an invitation to the extraordinary warmth that pours from Rostropovich like lava from some Slavic Vesuvius." Interviewing Rostropovich's many friends and associates for our story...
...Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed unremarked?except that the enraptured man on the podium was the renowned cellist and magnificent maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, the N.S.O.'s new permanent conductor, Washington's grandest new monument...
...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...