Mstislav Rostropovich

Few musicians inspired, and premiered, more great music than the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. A friend of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten, Dutilleux, Khachaturian, Messiaen, Bernstein, Berio and countless others, Rostropovich enriched the cello repertoire like no one else. Born in 1927 in Azerbaijan, where he grew up, Rostropovich moved to Moscow in 1943, aged 16, to study at the Conservatory. Fame came early and he became a major name. He married the soprano Galina Vishnevsakaya and together they became one of music's most high-profile couples in the USSR. In the early 1960s he took up conducting, often working with his wife, and, as a pianist, partnering her in song recitals. His support for democratic values and for artists' right to freedom of expression, including giving shelter to the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, put him on a collision course with the Soviet authorities and in 1974 he and his family left the USSR, being stripped of their citizenship four years later. Already a major star in the West, he soon picked up his career both as a cellist and a conductor (he held the post of Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington from 1977 to 1992) and also developed a close relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra. He recorded many of the works he commissioned or inspired, and made many classic recordings of the key cello repertoire including the Dvořák concerto with Karajan, the Brahms sonatas with Rudolf Serkin, Beethoven trios with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Bruno Giuranna, Chopin with Martha Argerich and the Schubert Quintet with the Emerson Quartet. He also conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky ballet suites, a classic recording. He died in 2007 aged 80.