今天看到Rostropovich去世的消息，不禁感觉有点怅然。事有碰巧的是，我去北京20余天，购书不过4本，其中两本都是关于Rostropovich的，在火车上也将他的传记完整读了一遍，刚回到上海，就传来他逝世的消息，真是冥冥中有某种暗示。
    Rostropovich的大提琴录音，我听过的不算少，大体而言，离开苏联前后对于他而言是个比较明显的分水岭，1978年，他被开除苏联国籍，从此流浪西方世界。他前期的演奏，俄罗斯民族的那种悲怆与沧桑感相当强烈，基本延续了柴可夫斯基、拉赫玛尼诺夫的俄罗斯音乐风格，而他对于德沃夏克的演绎，特别我曾经听过的那一个与卡拉杨合作的版本，听后相当令人动容，让我先前诟病他晚期演奏的态度大有改变。但是毫无疑问，长期流浪西方世界，他的音乐由于失去俄罗斯文化的持续滋润，Rostropovich的演奏越到晚年越显干涩，虽然我还没有系统听完他晚期的录音，但是从基本的聆听经验来看，晚期演奏似乎不如早期那么感情充沛。但是这并不意味他音乐走向末路，他对BACH的大无一直有着特殊的感情，我前不久刚好买下他1991年在法国Basilique Sainte Madeleine录制的BACH大无DVD，听过两次，但是并无法完全把握他的演奏，不过我对他的第二组曲印象却十分深刻，从那里我似乎听到了他早年的俄罗斯情怀，但是却已经收敛成尽洗铅华。
    可以肯定的是，他的演奏要远超YOYOMA的浮华，他既然对BACH有如此的眷恋，想必他一定从中领悟到什么，而我现在，却无法通过他的演奏把握住他的理解，或许对于这样一位演奏家，我们还需要更多的时间去理解，去聆听吧。
　　他和苏联时代之间的关系也是错综复杂，他与Shostakovic,索尔仁尼琴的患难之交也说明，他对于那个制度对于人性的压抑，有着自己独特的认知，不过他的音乐表达，到底和那个时代有什么样的关系，这却不是我现在所能置喙的了。
　　最后引用索尔仁尼琴写给他的信中的一段话，或许可以作为他最好的悼念与总结：
　　“我非常钦佩你的音乐天才、光明磊落的天性以及你无比城市的思维方式。但同时我又担心，俄罗斯历史和子孙后代将对你做出何种评价。通常，为了艺术的艺术是存在的，但这偏偏不是俄罗斯的传统。在俄罗斯，这种艺术不会留下感激的记忆。这是因为我们国家有着另一种传统，即我们总是要求本国的天才置身于人民的灾难之中。”
　　　找到Rostropovic与BPO合作的柴可夫斯基的“如歌的行板”，也传到BLOG上，这个曲子是如此的耳熟能详，以至于有时候感觉有了肥皂音乐的味道，但是我所找到的这个版本，如今听来却是愁绪万千，俄罗斯音乐的精神，非要在苦难的绝境中才能表现出那种近乎残酷的美感，真是一种让人难以取舍的悖论。

Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist, conductor and pianist whose death aged 80 was announced today, was generally regarded as the greatest, and was certainly the most famous, cellist since Pablo Casals.

Works were written for him by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Lutoslawski, Bliss and others, all of whom were his friends.

advertisementHe took up conducting when he was 33 and made a parallel career on the rostrum in the opera house and the concert-hall.

He was a talented enough pianist to act as accompanist to his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, whom he married in 1955.

In 1989 he celebrated the demolition of the Berlin Wall by playing Bach’s cello suites amid the rubble; and he became a national hero in Russia in August 1991 when, without telling his wife, he flew from Paris to Moscow after the coup against President Gorbachev and joined Boris Yeltsin inside the besieged Parliament building. He spent the night lifting the spirits of the deputies and broadcasting messages to the crowds in the square outside. Next morning he was carried shoulder-high from the building, and an admirer told him: “It was because you were there that they did not storm the Parliament.”

Rostropovich afterwards described it as “the most important, dangerous and emotional day of my life. I was ready to die and happy to die.”

Twenty years earlier Rostropovich had fallen foul of Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet hierarchy when he and Vishnevskaya publicly defended the dissident novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn and offered him accommodation in their home. Concerts and recordings were cancelled, and for a year they were denied exit visas to fulfil foreign engagements.

In 1974 virtual banishment followed when the couple were allowed to leave Russia for two years and were later deprived of their Soviet citizenship. In 1990 this was restored by a parliamentary decree under Gorbachev’s regime, and a month later Rostropovich returned to Moscow and Leningrad to conduct four concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, of which he had been principal conductor since 1977.

His first act was to go to the cemetery. He explained: “I have lost all my friends: Shostakovich, Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, Khatchaturian, that whole generation. My old accompanist is dead, too, even my dear friend Sakharov.”

Oistrakh had once said to him: “Never return once you have left. If you get nostalgic, buy a big house and plant birch trees everywhere.”

Mstislav Leopoldvich Rostropovich was born in Baku on March 27 1927. His father was a distinguished cellist and teacher, his mother a concert pianist. He studied the piano from the ages of four to seven, then took up the cello; but his ambition was to be a conductor.

Rostropovich’s father was his cello teacher, until he died in 1942, when the family was evacuated from wartime Moscow. They returned to the capital in 1943, when Rostropovich entered the Conservatory to study composition, cello and piano.

His uncle, also a cellist, was head of the Conservatory and persuaded Shostakovich to hear a piano concerto Rostropovich had written. Shostakovich was so impressed that he accepted the young man into his already over-full composition class and tried to persuade him to abandon the cello.

At the end of his first year, Rostropovich won the Tchaikovsky Stipendium, the Conservatory’s only composition prize. But in 1945, as a cellist, he also won the first national Soviet competition since 1937.

In 1948 he invited Prokofiev to one of his recitals, at which he played the composer’s cello concerto. This work had been a failure at its first performance in 1939. Prokofiev was so impressed by the young cellist’s artistry that he revised the concerto and then converted it into the Sinfonia Concertante, dedicating it to Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in February 1952 with Sviatoslav Richter conducting.
The recital at which Rostropovich had played the concerto occurred 12 days before the infamous Andrei Zhdanov, who ran Stalin’s cultural policy, denounced Shostakovich and Prokofiev for their failure to reflect “Soviet realism” in their music.

“When I went afterwards for my lesson with Shostakovich,” Rostropovich recalled, “my fellow students silently directed me to a notice board where I read that Shostakovich was sacked as ‘not adequate to be a teacher’.”

Despite pressure at the Conservatory, Rostropovich refused to join the Communist Party, and was probably saved from arrest or exile to Siberia by his immense talent. He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951 and became a professor at Moscow Conservatory in 1956.

advertisementRostropovich made his London debut at the Royal Festival Hall in March 1956 and in Carnegie Hall, New York, a month later. His playing was eulogised by the Western critics and he immediately became the idol of audiences and of society hostesses. On a visit to London in 1960 he gave the British première of Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, dedicated to him, and afterwards was introduced by Shostakovich to Benjamin Britten.

This was the beginning of a warm and fruitful friendship. The two men communicated in what they called “Aldeburgh Deutsch”, and it was soon “Beninka” and “Slava”.

Rostropovich asked Britten to write a work for him, and the result, within a few months, was a cello sonata. They played this through together at Britten’s London flat when both were very nervous; they drank five large whiskies apiece before they started.

“We played like pigs but were very happy,” Rostropovich said. They gave the first performance in July 1961 at the Aldeburgh Festival. The sonata was followed by three unaccompanied suites and the Cello Symphony. Britten also wrote cadenzas for Rostropovich to play in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C. The first performance of the Cello Symphony was given by Rostropovich, with Britten conducting, in Moscow in March 1964.

Rostropovich and his wife were frequent visitors to, and performers at, the Aldeburgh Festival; and after Britten’s death in 1976 Rostropovich was for 11 years one of the festival’s artistic directors — he conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin there in 1979.

Rostropovich made his debut as a conductor in 1960 in the Russian city of Gorki when Vishnevskaya was soprano soloist in the first performance of Shostakovich’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. In 1968 he conducted Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi, Moscow, with his wife as Tatyana.

His London conducting debut was with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in September 1974. The next year he conducted Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades in San Francisco.

He was appointed conductor and artistic director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC in 1977, relinquishing the post 17 years later.

His work schedule was phenomenal. He once said that he had no time to suffer from jet-lag because he didn’t know from which city he should count the hours. Existing on a few hours’ sleep, he would study scores for three hours from 5 am.

He did not practise his cello-playing every day, but would sometimes “relax” after conducting a concert by embarking on three or four hours of practice. He thought nothing of conducting in, say, Paris, flying the next day to Washington and flying back to London a day or two later.

During his exile he became an unofficial ambassador for Russian music and counted most of the world’s leaders and princes (and princesses) among his friends. Those jealous of his fame complained that he was too assiduous in his cultivation of the high-and-mighty.

He had homes in several countries, but his two daughters, Elena and Olga, went to live in the United States and their children are American citizens. His wife was happiest in Paris. It was there that he made several recordings, including the first of the original version of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, again with Vishnevskaya in the title-role.
In 1987, the year of his 60th birthday, the Queen appointed Rostropovich an honorary KBE, and in the same year he received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan, while France appointed him a Commander of the Légion d’honneur; he conducted and played in 19 concerts and recitals in Washington and New York; in London he was soloist in 15 concerto performances, and conducted four symphonies and Britten’s War Requiem.

Contemporary composers such as Dutilleux and Penderecki wrote works for Rostropovich; in all, nearly 50 concertante works were written for him during his career, including a second concerto from Shostakovich.

In 1990 he directed the London Symphony Orchestra in a Shostakovich season at the Barbican, returning to London the following year as soloist and conductor of 12 concerts in a Prokofiev festival.

advertisementIn 1993 he conducted a Barbican concert performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes.

In November 2005 Rostropovich cancelled an engagement to conduct Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Bolshoi, Moscow, because of a combination of ill health and dissatisfaction with rehearsal conditions.

In April last year he announced that the world première in Vienna of Penderecki’s Largo would be his last public appearance as a cellist.

His recordings are many, both as cellist and conductor. They include complete cycles of Tchaikovsky’s and Prokofiev’s symphonies and several operas. He did not record the Elgar concerto, dropping it from his repertory after he had heard Jacqueline du Pré’s performance: “She did it perfectly, and unless I could say something new about the work, I decided not to play it.”

In 1975 he bought the Duport Stradivari of 1711 (once used by the cellist who had played in the Archduke Trio of Beethoven with the composer as pianist) and played it thereafter.

“Air France don’t charge me for the cello on Concorde,” he complained, “but the British Concorde do.”

Rostropovich returned to Moscow recently after living for a number of years in Paris. He had been suffering from cancer, but was able to attend, in March, his 80th birthday celebrations at the Kremlin, when President Putin presented him with the Order of Service to the Fatherland.

Technically Rostropovich’s playing opened up new vistas for cellists. His pizzicato was magical, and his control of a broad, sweeping melodic line unequalled. His interpretations were often as impulsive and emotional as his personality, and he would distort phrases to suit his own view of the music. Usually his playing was of such incandescence and power that these infidelities to the composer’s printed score could be forgiven and indulged.

It was much the same with his conducting. He did not possess the technical wizardry and baton technique of a Karajan, but his artistic personality, and his innate and easily communicated musicianship, were such that orchestras and singers responded wholeheartedly to him; magnificent performances often followed, especially in works he loved and understood, such as those of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

That he was one of the great musicians and musical personalities of the 20th century, a superstar par excellence, and a human being of extraordinary charisma is beyond dispute.

His wife and two daughters survive him.