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Keeper
of the Flame Ted
Libby
"Come over here. I want to show you something." We gathered round, and he opened the score to the first page of the symphony. "Here, this part," he said, pointing to the pianissimo entrance of the first violins at measure 10. He vocalised the line as his finger tracked the notes: C, D-C-G, F-G-A flat, D flat, high C -- "senza vibrato," he urgently added -- A flat-B flat-C... With his left hand he took hold of my wrist and pulled me closer, toward the music, so that I had to take a perch on the arm of executive producer Wolfgang Mohr's chair. "When I saw on television the press conference from Moscow by the leaders of the coup," Slava explained, referring to the August 1991 putsch against Gorbachev, "I heard these notes in my head like a message from Shostakovich, and tears came to my eyes. It was as if he were calling me. I knew then that I must go." Rostropovich, who was in Paris at the time, got on the next plane to Moscow and made his way to the Russian Parliament building, where he sweated out the tense hours of confrontation between the old-guard Communists and the defiant citizenry that had rallied to the side of Boris Yeltsin. Now, just six weeks later, though half a world away, he was recording that same music -- and very clearly bringing to the effort both his vivid personal memory of Shostakovich, who suffered so much under the Communist regime, and the incredible emotion of his own recent experience at the barricades. The orchestra had received an inspiring account of the standoff from Rostropovich at one of their rehearsals and it took no special talent to sense through the monitors the electric arc of feeling that informed their playing out in the hall. During his 15 years as its music director, Rostropovich has built the National Symphony into a powerhouse ensemble and together they have given many brilliant performances of Shostakovich's music. The Eighth has become one of their signature pieces: I have seen audiences in Washington and New York stagger out of halls in a daze after they finished playing it, and will never forget the awestruck expressions on the faces of listeners in Petersburg, then Leningrad, when Rostropovich and the NSO performed it there in the winter of 1990, climaxing the historic tour of the Soviet Union with which Rostropovich ended 16 years in exile. When it comes to Shostakovich's music, Rostropovich is painfully conscious of having been on close terms -- both artistically and personally -- with a giant. "I am making my best," he told me almost apologetically before heading back onstage to do the finale, "but I worry that it is not good enough. It is a little like asking a musician in the 19th Century, 'When's the last time you drank Kirschwasser with Beethoven?'." Slava's deep feelings for Shostakovich, the man, may have added to the weight of responsibility he feels as an interpreter of Shostakovich the composer, but they have also brought an unmistakable immediacy to the performances. With the death a few years ago of Evgeny Mravinsky, the dedicatee of the Eighth Symphony, Rostropovich became the undisputed keeper of the flame. Reason enough for Teldec to have set up its microphones, and to keep coming back until the entire cycle of Shostakovich symphonies has been recorded. For as the Twentieth Century nears its end, it is likelier than ever that Dmitri Shostakovich will be regarded as its patron musical saint.
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