Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich was born in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, in March 1927, into a family of musicians — his father the cellist Leopold Rostropovich, his mother the pianist Sofia Fedotova-Rostropovich. He studied piano alongside cello from childhood; his mother and Heinrich Neuhaus were his keyboard teachers, and he held the piano professorship at the Moscow Conservatory in parallel with his cello professorship through the 1950s and 1960s.

His pianism, by contrast with his cello work, was almost entirely in the service of vocal accompaniment. From his marriage to Galina Vishnevskaya in 1955 he became her regular recital partner, and across thirty years they gave concert programmes of the central Russian art-song repertoire — Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Britten — across the major recital halls of the world. His recordings with Vishnevskaya on EMI and Deutsche Grammophon, including the complete Mussorgsky songs and the Shostakovich vocal cycles, defined the late Russian art-song recital tradition. He occasionally appeared as a solo pianist in chamber music — notably with Britten, with whom he formed a long musical friendship after their first meeting in 1960.

Rostropovich was a defender of Boris Yeltsin during the 1991 coup attempt. He died in Moscow in April 2007. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his concert and recital partnerships as pianist alongside the substantial cello and conductor entries.