Word: rostropovich
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...skilled laborers, affords congregants a chance to swap notes on craft: in this case, new strings and rosin, drills for thumb position, double stops and staccato at the frog. But this year's festival, which ran Oct. 3-7, was different. The absence of the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who co-founded the biennial event in 1993 and died in April aged 80, left its participants pondering his legacy and celebrating the unexpectedly prominent role he and his instrument had played in the history of the 20th century...
...Rostropovich went by the nickname "Slava," meaning glory - or, in the translation preferred by the American composer Leonard Bernstein, "possessed by the gods." I knew Slava through my father, Lynn Harrell, who belongs to a generation of cellists that inherited an instrument Rostropovich had changed forever. My memory of our meetings is of Slava's effusive affection: from bear hugs to damp kisses on both cheeks. Everyone he met - hotel workers, the Emperor of Japan, even the Pope - left with wet cheeks. Both with and without his instrument, it seemed, it was his goal to touch as many people...
...series of unaccompanied suites by Bach, is the orchestra's most solitary instrument. It is also one of the most intimate, a result of its proximity in range and expression to the human voice, and also the posture of its player, which is one of embrace. In Rostropovich's hands, this potent mixture of the familiar and the solitary turned the cello into an instrument of dissent, embodying the lone, heroic voice in its 20th century struggle against oppression...
Particularly in the cello concertos of Dmitri Shostakovich and Witold Lutoslawski, written for Rostropovich, he set his instrument in conflict with the orchestra, a doomed but determined voice in a struggle against the collective. But no matter how isolated he seemed on stage, Rostropovich was not without an ensemble; his allegiance was with the audience, which responded instinctively in support. "I give people music and beauty," he once said. "In exchange they give me love and recognition...
Sometimes, the struggle against authority was literal. On Aug. 21, 1968, the day Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, Rostropovich played with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra in London. Watched by hovering KGB minders - "Sputniks," the musicians privately called them - he was greeted by shouts of protest. But his performance of the mournful, defiant concerto by the Czech composer Antonín Dvorák brought the hall to a comprehending silence. "As I played, I saw the dead in the Prague streets through my tears," he later said...