Word: rostropovich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Slava, not maestro. He refuses to 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?...
...Rostropovich has a distinctly colloquial talent for giving instructions to the orchestra. For a crisp pizzicato, he says: "I want hear champagne corks popping." For a soft passage: "Before the sound is coming, smell some bee-oo-tee-fool flowers." For a lyrical passage: "You don't say 'I LOFF YOU!' You whisper [cuddling an imaginary violin] 'I LOFF YOU.' " For a subito forte (to play suddenly loud): "Imagine you with your girl friend. Suddenly your wife come into room. That is subito forte...
Despite such engaging ways, many musicians and critics complain that Rostropovich takes too many liberties with his music, both at the cello and on the podium. Cellist Starker, whose style is considerably cooler and more disciplined than Slava's, deplores -"the personal approach that disregards the composer and stresses the feelings of the individual." It is not that Rostropovich insists upon sending his disregards to the composer; he simply hears phrases, colors and rhythms that nobody else hears. The result is that when he conducts, his soloist's gift for subtlety sometimes deserts him. In Vienna two years...
...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," says Bernstein. "He does things that one would think would simply destroy the form of the piece. But he makes it work because of the tremendous conviction and love that...
They were difficult years. Each foreign plaudit that fell upon Solzhenitsyn was followed by a turn of the Kremlin's screw at the dacha. As Rostropovich tells it, "Official people said I must kick him out. My wife and I did not find that reasonable. We explained our point of view?that each human being has a right to make of his life what he wants." In October 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize. When the Soviet press increased its abuse of the author, Rostropovich became enraged and decided to write a letter of protest. Says he: "This was greatest...