Looking Back at Rostropovich with the NSO

In 1976 I was fourteen and had the privilege of attending the master classes given by Mstislav Rostropovich at UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall, where I had played in a 200-piece cello orchestra for him the previous year. He had come to the Bay Area to conduct Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame at the San Francisco Opera with his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the leading role, his first performances following his exile from the Soviet Union. I got to talk to him a few times, I called him Slava as he asked me to, and he showed me the cello he played, the "Duport" Stradivarius, including the famous dent made in its body by the spurs on Napoleon Bonaparte's boots when he insisted that its owner Jean-Louis Duport let him try the instrument. He was very friendly and happy to be in the United States. He did, however, cause some consternation for the piano accompanist of the master class when, after the first student played the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata op. 102 #1, Slava asked the audience if there was a pianist present who knew the part to that work. Someone did, and he came down to accompany the student. After they played the same passage, Rostropovich castigated the student for playing it exactly the same way, with no communication with the new pianist. The official accompanist, relieved that she wasn't the problem, resumed her place on the bench. 

The following year Rostropovich became the fourth music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for seventeen years. Following on the heels of Antal Dorati's 7-year tenure and the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, Rostropovich's time with the NSO coincided with the development of Washington as a glamorous city as dedicated to the arts as it is to politics; for example, the Kennedy Center Honors began in 1978. The naming of a prominent Russian musician to lead the American capital's orchestra was the perfect Cold War maneuver, and it paid off with Rostropovich's ability to attract top-tier talent, fill seats, make recordings, and create indelible memories for NSO musicians and the community.  

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Leonard Bernstein, whose MASS opened the Kennedy Center, was a great friend of Rostropovich's and supporter of his NSO tenure. They first met in 1959 when Bernstein took the New York Philharmonic to the Soviet Union, and in 1976 they made a highly acclaimed record together of works by Schumann and Bloch with the French National Orchestra. Rostropovich's second set of concerts with the NSO as music director, in October 1977, was an all-Bernstein program in which he was both a conductor - in the work written especially for the occasion, Slava! (A Political Overture) - and cello soloist in Three Meditations from MASS.  

This was a good way for Rostropovich to signal that he was dedicated to performing new music and music by Americans, which he did. But it was no secret that his specialty was the Russian repertoire, including the two giants with whom he worked closely, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as well as passionate performances of Tchaikovsky like the one we hear of the Pathetique Symphony on this month’s NSO Showcase, made during the orchestra’s historic trip to Russia in 1990, when Rostropovich was welcomed back to his homeland with open arms a year before the official dissolution of the USSR. His interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s devastating final work was deeply personal; Bass Trombonist Matthew Guilford remembers: “There is a very solemn low brass chorale near the close of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6. It is a prayer offered in despair. Slava would put down his baton and allow the trombones and tuba to make the offering without conducting. That was trust and it was human, beautiful and impactful.” 

Three years later, during his final season with the NSO, they went back to Russia to become the first orchestra ever to perform in Red Square – an event its participants have dubbed “the Coldest Concert Ever.” Violinist Jane Bowyer Stewart remembers: “On a makeshift platform in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral, we played the 1812 Overture in 40-degree weather. Before fingerless gloves were a fashion statement, we created them out of necessity. Woodwind players struggled to keep their instruments in tune, but the tens of thousands of listeners (including one Boris Yeltsin) who packed the massive square applauded fervently. Bells rang out from behind the Kremlin walls. Journalists hailed the event as ‘a symbol of liberty.’” 

Rostropovich was succeeded at the NSO by Leonard Slatkin, who was its music director from 1996-2008. Maestro Slatkin, who turned 80 in September, and returned to the Kennedy Center November 14-17 with pianist Emanuel Ax in Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 and Walton’s Symphony no. 1, as well as a work by Slatkin’s wife, the American composer and educator Cindy McTee called Double Play. 

But back to Rostropovich. In my youth I knew him as the dominant cellist of the 1960s and 70s, the heir to the mantle of Pablo Casals – not only as a groundbreaking practitioner of the instrument, but as someone whose passion for creating the beauty and order of music naturally led to efforts to have real life reflect that same sense of harmony. Rostropovich took tremendous personal risks to champion human rights, free speech, and the thawing of relations across antagonistic boundaries - values that may have been born of his yearning for freedom in the darkest days of totalitarian oppression in the USSR but also represent the essence of the philosophy of the founders of the United States – making him one of the most inspiring leaders in the history of the nation’s capital. 

But he could be inspiring in other ways too. I’ll never forget his description he offered during that master class of the dynamic marking subito forte (suddenly loud): “you’re in bed with your girlfriend and your wife walks in.” (It’s much more effective with a Russian accent.) That certainly inspired some new thoughts for my fourteen-year-old self.