Word: rostropovich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...elusive yet keen emotional pull, at times both mournful and celebratory. Performing them all in one evening, as Ma has on occasion, and will again this month in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, is a feat of endurance--marathon and obstacle course in one. These are pieces that Rostropovich did not essay on record until he was in his 60s. Ma first recorded them when he was just 26. It is music entwined with his life: he first encountered them at four, when his father, a violinist and a pedagogue, introduced him to the cello by having him memorize...
...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...
...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...
That performance was part of a veritable Schnittke festival in the U.S. in recent weeks. Among the highlights: the American premiere of the composer's second piano sonata by pianist Boris Berman, the American debut of his Symphony No. 6 in Washington under Rostropovich's baton, and conductor Leon Botstein's North American premiere with the American Symphony Orchestra of Schnittke's Faust Cantata, an oratorio version of an opera in progress. Against all odds, Schnittke is among the most commissioned of living composers...