Word: rostropovich
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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...
International Editor Jesse Birnbaum, who was assisted by Reporter-Researcher Nancy Newman, flew to Washington last week for Rostropovich's premiere concert as musical director and had a similar feeling as he began writing this story. Says Birnbaum: "With Rostropovich, there is his beautiful music, but there is also the man-his poverty as a boy, his great triumphs, his struggle with Soviet authorities, his coming to America. It's a remarkable tale...
...razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by 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...
What was a nice, "serious" musician doing in a piece like this? It was an all-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...
...love life more now than I did as a boy, and I will go on loving it more until my last moments." The speaker was Painter Marc Chagall, who celebrated his 90th birthday last week. For the occasion, his friend and fellow Russian, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, helped to organize a gala concert in Nice, not far from Chagall's hillside home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Among the other performers who played or sang in his honor: Violinist Isaac Stern, Baritone Hermann Prey and Flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. Chagall attended the concert as well as a nearby exhibition...