Word: mstislav
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this what it means to be an elite classical musician in the age of Clinton? One has a hard time picturing Mstislav Rostropovich pulling off his pants in front of reporters. Nor, for that matter, can one picture Pablo Casals recording albums with jazz singers or Texas fiddlers or Argentine tango musicians as Ma has done. Or either cellist initiating, as Ma has, an ambitious series of six hour-long films inspired by Bach's six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, involving collaborators as diverse as movie director Atom Egoyan, modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris, ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher...
...natural to wonder how Ma stacks up next to his most celebrated predecessors, Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich (both of whose complete sets are currently available on EMI). Casals' classic performances, originally recorded between 1936 and 1939, have a sober grandeur that continues to seize and hold the ear six decades later; the Rostropovich set, recorded in 1991, is a larger-than-life exercise in musical oratory that bears the same relationship to "normal" cello playing that one of Chuck Close's jumbo portraits does to a black-and-white snapshot. Ma's strong, sensitive playing falls somewhere between these...
...which houses an opera house, a concert hall and theaters, did score some coups, including a dazzling visit by the Berlin Opera in 1975 and a now legendary Fidelio conducted by Leonard Bernstein in 1979. Still, the also-ran image persisted; not even the appointment of the respected cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to head the National Symphony Orchestra in 1977 gave the town's homegrown musical institutions a wider visibility...
...turning up on MTV. But no living composer of so-called serious music exerts so much hold on the imagination and loyalty of his interpreters as does the reclusive Schnittke, 59. Performers from the old East bloc such as violinist Gidon Kremer, a fellow Soviet emigre, cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Kurt Masur have been championing his works for years. Now, it seems, the rest of the world is catching...
...with a hapless couple and destroys their lives, is, of course, purely intentional. Schnittke limns the moral and social breakdown of "I" and his "Wife" in a score of terrifying, eclectic intensity. The first-rate performance, recorded live at the premiere last year in Amsterdam, is led by Mstislav Rostropovich -- in his element, as always, in the music of his homeland...