Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich was born in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, in March 1927, the son of the cellist Leopold Rostropovich and the pianist Sofia Fedotova-Rostropovich. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1943 under Semyon Kozolupov, and from his late teens combined an unusually rapid international solo career with a substantial composition study under Vissarion Shebalin and Dmitri Shostakovich. His Prague Spring Festival début in 1947 established him as one of the leading cellists of his generation.

His instrumental career across the next sixty years made him the central cellist of the twentieth century alongside Pablo Casals and Gregor Piatigorsky. His central solo repertoire was the standard concerto literature — the Dvořák, Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Haydn, Boccherini — alongside an unparalleled body of contemporary work composed for him: Prokofiev’s *Symphony-Concerto* (1952), Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto (1959) and Second Cello Concerto (1966), Britten’s *Cello Symphony* (1963) and three Solo Cello Suites (1964, 1967, 1971), Lutosławski’s *Cello Concerto* (1970), Penderecki’s Second Cello Concerto (1982), and Dutilleux’s *Tout un monde lointain*. His recordings of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites and the Beethoven cello sonatas (with Sviatoslav Richter) defined the late-twentieth-century cello recording tradition. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974 he continued his solo career from Washington and London.

Rostropovich died in Moscow in April 2007. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his cello concert and recital work alongside the conductor and pianist entries.