Word: rostropovich
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...when musicians could afford their own Strad is coming to an end," Ehnes says. The concert violinist Cho-Liang Lin says the Stradivarius he bought for $300,000 25 years ago is probably worth $3 million now. He points to the sale of recently deceased cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's Duport Stradivarius, which trade publications recently put at $20 million. "There's no way even a highly successful young musician could afford that," he says...
Exiled to the West in 1974, Rostropovich earned mass admiration, and a king's fortune. When he became music director of America's National Symphony Orchestra three years later, TIME put him on its cover, branding him, with cold-war gusto, "Washington's greatest new monument." But he always maintained a refugee's yearning for his homeland, and this only intensified the pathos of his playing. His Paris apartment was a veritable Hermitage of Russian artifacts, and even after he was stripped of his citizenship, he proudly described himself as Russian, an allegiance he affirmed by flying to Moscow earlier...
...cello soloists, 98 cello students and countless music lovers gathered in Kronberg. Every cellist knows deep down that no matter how alive their instrument seems in their hands, it will return at their passing to its dormant state: a wooden box with four strings. Most agreed that Rostropovich's greatest legacy was his ability to cajole and inspire the major composers of the century to write for the cello. In total, there are said to be 132 compositions that owe their existence to his enthusiastic suggestion, a figure evident in the many scores lying around studios and practice rooms...
Other than these bequests, what will remain of Rostropovich? Will his heroic playing be remembered as a cause of history or a futile response to it? Rostropovich famously performed an impromptu solo at the Berlin Wall in 1989, but he did not make it fall. He played with searing passion in London in 1968, but the tanks rolled on Prague regardless. Songbirds can't bring the dawn; they can only endure the darkness until it ends...
...settled into my seat for the festival's Rostropovich Memorial Concert, I thought how sad it was that death had succeeded even where the Soviet hammer had failed, in silencing this seemingly indomitable voice. But then there was the sound of the cello again, that warm and human sound, as the soloist poured forth on the stage, and it was as if Slava were there once more because every cheek in the house was wet, and at this moment, a moment he would have loved, it was enough to know that in his playing, and forever in his instrument, there...