Rostropovich Lives a Life in Allegro

Many people think it would be reasonable if beloved 73-year-old cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich started cutting down his activities a bit.

Rostropovich isn’t one of them.

“I’m not slowing down,” he said in a recent phone interview from Munich. “I work like a horse.”

Rostropovich was in Munich to conduct a concert version of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

That program precedes his concert Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, where he will play concertos by Haydn and Saint-Saens with the Pasadena Symphony led by Jorge Mester.

The program is part of a six-city tour that started in New York on Sunday (to coincide with the 75th birthday of his friend, pianist Eugene Istomin) and ends in Philadelphia shortly after his Cerritos date with him conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.

But that is only a small segment of the 100 international dates ahead this season.

“I like coming to the United States because the United States played an important role in my life,” said Rostropovich, who is now a resident of St. Petersburg, Russia. “I was there for 17 years as music director [of the National Symphony]. That was a very important time in my life.”

Indeed it was.

In 1974, Rostropovich and his wife, Bolshoi soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, left the Soviet Union after four years of restricted concert activity and harassment because they had sheltered dissident novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

The National Symphony threw Rostropovich a lifeline and after a brilliant debut conducting the orchestra, he became its music director in 1977. A year later, both he and his wife were stripped of their Soviet citizenship as “ideological renegades.”

In fact, the break had been a long time coming.

Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku, a city on the Caspian Sea. He showed extraordinary musical gifts early, proving equally adept at piano and cello. He wasn’t bad at composition, either.

At 16, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

At 18, in 1945, he won the gold medal at the first-ever Soviet competition for young musicians. He would go on to earn both the Lenin and Stalin prizes, among the Soviet Union’s highest honors.

At the same time, however, he was having increasing run-ins with communist authorities.

When Shostakovich was officially denounced in the late 1940s, for instance, Rostropovich was one of the few musicians who continued to associate with him. The cellist also smuggled the manuscript of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”), a 1962 work based on anti-Soviet poems, to the West after communist officials forbade its performance.

In 1970, Rostropovich and his wife drew particular rebuke not only for housing Solzhenitsyn but also for writing an internationally publicized letter attacking the way the government was suppressing the novelist.

Retaliation was swift and heartless. Concert dates were so severely curtailed that the cellist fell into depression and, according to his wife’s memoir, turned to drink.

As much as Rostropovich embraced the U.S., when perestroika gave him an opening in 1990, he returned to the USSR. That year his citizenship was also restored. The Soviet Union broke up a year later.

Although his address is now St. Petersburg, home, he joked, is “in an airplane.”

More than 170 pieces have been created for Rostropovich by composers such as Britten, Dutilleux, Ginastera, Lutoslawski and Messiaen. But his connection with Shostakovich--who wrote two cello concertos for him--had been special.

Rostropovich regards the controversies surrounding Shostakovich--was he a secret anti-Soviet as one author purports to prove, or a composer who went along to get along--as “children’s games.”

“When Shostakovich was still alive, no one asked these questions,” said Rostropovich. “He was able to speak to the question immediately. That possibility does not exist now. Now there is this game afoot because in the final analysis, Shostakovich cannot reply.”

In the end, his relationship with the Soviet establishment isn’t the point, says the cellist, it’s his greatness as a composer.

Since returning to Russia, Rostropovich has been dedicated to helping his country.

He was been influential in the restoration of the Moscow Conservatory and the rebuilding of Christ Cathedral in Moscow. The Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation has raised and sent more than $5 million in medicine, food and equipment to children’s hospitals and clinics in Russia.

“I feel very optimistic,” he said. “Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it’s still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.”

And the world in general?

“Classical music is more important now than ever,” Rostropovich said. “People are craving this great progress in electronics, going after computers, the Internet, etc. It’s a giant progress technologically. But they must have a balance of soul, a balance for human beauty. That means art has an important role.

“And music does not need an interpreter; music doesn’t need a translator. If I make a speech, I need a translator. But music does not need a translation. People understand me through the sound. That I think is very important. This is just one planet, like one family.”

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* Mstislav Rostropovich will play cello concertos by Haydn and Saint-Saens with the Pasadena Symphony led by Jorge Mester on Friday at 8 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. The program also will include works by Mozart and Schubert. $60 to $75. (800) 300-4345.

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