Mstislav Leopoldovich "Glory" Rostropovich (Russian: Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, March 27, 1927 - April 27, 2007) Soviet and Russian cellist and conductor. He is considered one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century. In addition to his interpretation and technique, he was well known as the author of new works that expanded the cello’s repertoire more than any cellist before or after.
Young years
Mstislav Rostropovich was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, into a family of musicians who moved from Orenburg: Leopold Rostropovich, the famous cellist and former student Pablo Casals, and Sofia Nikolaevna Fedotova-Rostropovich, a talented pianist.
Rostropovich grew up and spent his childhood and youth in Baku. During the Second World War, his family returned to Orenburg, and then in Moscow in 1943. At the age of four, Rostropovich begins to study piano with his mother. And at the age of 10, he, under the guidance of his father, begins his acquaintance with the cello.
In 1943, at the age of 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied playing the cello and piano with his uncle Semyon Kozolupov, and the art of owning a conductor’s stick and composition with Vissarion Shebalin. One of his teachers was Dmitry Shostakovich. In 1945, he won a gold medal in the first ever competition for young musicians in the history of the Soviet Union. In 1948 he graduated from the conservatory, and already in 1956 he became a professor of cello in the same place.
First concerts
Rostropovich gave his first cello concert in 1942. He won first prize at the international music award in Prague and Budapest in 1947, 1949 and 1950. In 1950, at the age of 23, he became a laureate of the Stalin Prize. At that time, Rostropovich was already well known in his country and at that time was actively engaged in a solo career, taught at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow Conservatories. In 1955, he married Galina Vishnevskaya, a leading soprano of the Bolshoi Theater. In 1956, their daughter Olga is born, and in 1958, daughter Elena.
Rostropovich collaborated a lot with Soviet composers of that era. In 1949, Sergei Prokofiev wrote his sonata for cello under the 22-year-old Rostropovich, and the next year he gave a concert based on the works of Svyatoslav Richter. In 1952, Prokofiev dedicated his symphony concert to him, which Mstislav masterfully performed in 1952. No less fruitfully he worked with Dmitry Kabalevsky and Dmitry Shostakovich.
His international career began in 1963 at the Liege Conservatory (with Cyril Kondrashin) and in 1964 in West Germany.
Abroad, he actively collaborates with world-class composers such as Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutitier, Vitold Lutoslavsky, Krzysztof Penderetsky, as well as with Olivier Messian.
Rostropovich took private conducting lessons from Leo Ginzburg, and in November 1962 in Gorky, he first got up at the conductor's console, performing four excerpts from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Shostakovich, orchestration of the Mussorgsky song and the dance of death. In 1967, at the invitation of the Bolshoi Theater, he conducted Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin.
