Mstislav Rostropovich as Conductor and Accompanist

The feature that most distinguishes Mstislav Rostropovich: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon (DG) from its “parallel” collection, The Complete EMI Recordings, is the presence of Rostropovich without his cello. On eleven of the CDs in the DG box, Rostropovich exchanges his cello for a conductor’s baton, while, in the final two CDs, he sits down at the piano to accompany his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. Vishnevskaya also appears in five of the discs on which Rostropovich is conducting, because these take in two full-length operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca (with Vishnevskaya in the title role) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (in which she sings the role of Liza).

Two of the orchestral recordings were made with the Berlin Philharmonic. Both of these provide more of Tchaikovsky’s music. The first contains suites from two of his full-length ballets, The Sleeping Beauty (Opus 66) and Swan Lake (Opus 20), neither of which was compiled by Tchaikovsky himself. The second rounds out the “ballet trilogy” with Tchaikovsky’s own suite (Opus 71a) from The Nutcracker. It also includes the Opus 45 “Capriccio Italien” and an arrangement for cello and string orchestra of the second movement (Andante cantabile) of the Opus 11 string quartet. As might be guessed, Rostropovich takes the solo work on this track, conducting from behind his cello.

The remaining orchestral recordings were made with the National Symphony Orchestra, based at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where Rostropovich served as music director between 1977 and 1994. Two of these albums involve his working with piano soloists. Martha Argerich plays the concertos of those two nineteenth-century composers born in the same year, Robert Schumann (Opus 54 in A minor) and Frédéric Chopin (Opus 21 in F minor, the second). On the other hand Mikhail Pletnev plays concertos by two Russian composers who were roughly contemporary but striking different in style, Sergei Rachmaninoff (Opus 30 in D minor) and Sergei Prokofiev (Opus 26 in C major). Curiously, these were the third concertos of both composers.

I never had an opportunity to observe Rostropovich conducting in concert. I gather from others that he could be very engaging and that his relationship with the National members was a good one. There is certainly nothing to complain about in any of the orchestral discs in this collection, but there is also not much to make one raise one’s eyebrows. Nevertheless, the orchestral selections are definitely more satisfying than the account of Tosca, which too often sounds more like shaking up the listener with amplitude than with making any dramatic impression. The Queen of Spades, on the other hand, does not get very much exposure; so just having it in the collection is a virtue unto itself.

The same can be said of the two art song CDs. Most singers (at least in the United States) tend to shy away from the Russian repertoire. Having encountered some of this music in several recitals, I have to confess that just about every encounter has been an enlightening experience. Vishnevskaya definitely brings a well-informed voice to her selections; and I suspect that I shall probably turn to the last two CDs in this set for frequent subsequent listening.

Chamber Music Rules in the Deutsche Grammophon Rostropovich Box

While admirers of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich may have some difficulty choosing between The Complete EMI Recordings, released in January of 2009, and the more recent Mstislav Rostropovich: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon (DG), when it comes to chamber music, DG definitely rules the mother lode. This is not to dismiss the EMI offerings, which are likely to be of particular interest to those interested in cutting-edge modernism. However, those with a preference for more established traditions will definitely find their comfort zone in the DG selections, not only with Rostropovich but also with the company he keeps.

The “mother lode within the mother lode,” so to speak, is definitely the two discs containing the five sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven. As was the case with the violin sonatas, the first edition publications by N. Simrock list all of these sonatas as having been written for piano and cello; and it is clear that Beethoven saw himself as pianist and therefore worthy of “top billing.” The pianist on these recordings (originally released on Philips) is Sviatoslav Richter; and one could not ask for a better partnership of equals. Readers of this site are already aware of the clarity that Richter could bring to his expressive interpretation of whatever happened to be on the score pages, and Rostropovich matches him for both clarity and expressiveness every step of the way through these five sonatas. It is hard to imagine that anyone seriously interested in this side of Beethoven’s repertoire would want to be without these recordings.

On the hand the presence of three different recordings of Franz Schubert’s C major quintet might raise the eyebrows of those wondering if this is too much of a good thing. Each recording, of course, involves Rostropovich “sitting in” with a different string quartet at a different period in his career: the Taneyev Quartet in 1963, the Melos Quartet in 1977, and the Emerson String Quartet in 1990. There is no question about my own personal preference. Melos has a solid command of the Schubert quartet repertoire, having recorded all of them for DG. They are clearly “in charge” of both technical and rhetorical direction; and Rostropovich has no problem fitting in with them as a “team player.” (This is far from a secondary role. In one of my recital reviews for Examiner.com, I made the observation that, in this quintet, these is nothing secondary about the second cello!) On the other hand it is also interesting to listen to a younger Rostropovich joining forces with a Russian quartet, even if it is only for an alternative “nationalist perspective.”

A partnership as interesting as that with Richter can be found on the two discs of Decca recordings of Rostropovich performing with Benjamin Britten at the keyboard. Not all of these are performances of Britten’s own music, although the Opus 65 C major sonata for cello and piano is definitely a high point. However, there was often a decidedly recognizable element of playfulness that could be found when other composers were involved. There is a clear appreciation of the “fun” side of Schubert’s D. 821 sonata, originally composed for arpeggione, and the mocking rhetoric that can be found in both Robert Schumann’s Opus 102 “Volkston” (popular style) pieces and Claude Debussy’s D minor sonata.

If there is a weak spot in this collection, it can be found in the two discs of Beethoven string trios. These performances, recorded in 1988, brought Rostropovich together with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and violist Bruno Giuranna. Like the Opus 5 cellos sonatas, these were all written before 1800. However, while Richter and Rostropovich seem comfortable with the blending of exploration and wit that one finds in Opus 5, Mutter tends to lead the trios with an almost gruff aggression that does not really fit in with the playfulness that the young Beethoven could bring to those two elements of exploration and wit. These are performances that may honor the “flesh” of Beethoven’s score pages; but the “spirit” could have done with a bit more attention.

Fortunately, these are about the only weak selections in the chamber music side of this collection, making this genre a decided high point of DG’s anthology.

Miles Davis and Gregor Piatigorsky

Perhaps the only thing more awesome than the thoroughness with which Robin Kelley has accounted for the life of Thelonious Monk is the scope of his bibliography. As I read the book, I would occasionally tick off an item in one of the footnotes when it struck me as a source for further examination. Given the length of Kelley's book, I knew I should do this sparingly. Yesterday I took stock of all the ticks and started checking off which ones I could find in the San Francisco Public Library. I quickly realized that I would have to come up with a list short enough for a pile of books I could manage to carry home! I spent yesterday afternoon at the Library examining all of the candidates, homing in on six and rejecting five. I am not going to enumerate those five, because I suspect that there is still value in them. I had to make a pragmatic decision on what I could manage, and I am sure that I shall be reminded of all five of these books as my research proceeds.

Of the books that I did select, the most fascinating was probably Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews by Arthur Taylor. I realized that, in my own quest to tease out how and why it is that the nature of music has more to do with how that music is performed, rather than how it is documented in artifacts of notation, I often forget that the study of performance has more to do with anthropology (such as is practiced by someone like Pierre Bourdieu) than with music theory or music history. Anthropology, in turn, tends to be a product of methods of observation and interviewing. The problem in both of these settings, however, is that the anthropologist is almost always an outsider; and there any number of jokes about what happens when that outsider status goes awry.

Taylor, on the other hand, was very much an insider. His experiences as a drummer brought him in contact with so many of the leading figures of jazz history that, had he directed his efforts otherwise, he could have been as significant a chronicler of jazz as Jean Froissart had been for the first half of the Hundred Years' War. Instead, he chose a much more modest path. Beginning in 1966 he began to interview musicians whom he had worked with or known to document their perspectives on what "making jazz" meant to them. Notes and Tones is the result of that interviewing process, and it was one of those books that I could not wait to begin.

When the book first appeared, the first interview was with Miles Davis. In a subsequent edition published by Da Capo Press, Miles is preceded by Dexter Gordon; but my Library copy was the original Perigee edition. As could have been anticipated, Miles was not the most cooperative interview subject; but he also made it clear that he felt more comfortable talking with Taylor than with an outsider.

The passage from the interview that interested me the most was the following response to a question about how much things had changed since Miles was first starting to play jazz:

They don’t have anyplace to experiment for young guys who start playing and who play their own stuff. It’s because of all those records they make nowadays … you know, the guys copy off the records, so they don’t have anything original. You can’t find a musician who plays anything different. They all copy off each other. If I were starting out again, I wouldn’t listen to records. I very seldom listen to jazz records, because they all do the same thing. I only listen to guys that are original, like Ahmad Jamal and Duke Ellington, guys like Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Coltrane.

This interview was conducted on January 28, 1968. About a decade later I was working in Santa Barbara; and one of my colleagues had previously been in the Music Department at the University of Southern California, where he has served as a pianist for some of the classes taught by Gregor Piatigorsky. He told me that, when Piatigorsky got really mad at a student, the worst thing he could say was, "You sound just like a Rostropovich recording!" In retrospect I realize that he was saying exactly the same thing that Miles was saying to Taylor: The student was so obsessed with copying what (s)he heard on a recording that (s)he did not "have anything original" to say in his/her performance.

Any thought of performance as a "realization" of a notation document is a dangerous misconstruction. Performance is about "having something to say," which is worth saying only if it adds to an ongoing conversation, rather than just repeating what has already been said. The notation may provide the framework for structuring what one says; but the content of what one says resides in the approach one takes to performing, rather than in the notation being performed. This may be more evident when we consider the practices of jazz performers who relied almost entirely on working by ear (such as Art Tatum and Monk); but it is just as applicable in the classical domain, no matter how detailed the notated specifications may be. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it was not hard for Pierre Boulez to find common ground with Frank Zappa. Both saw notation as a path to push the envelope of what one could do in performance; but both knew that the music was in the performance, rather than the notation. My only regret is that, of the two of them, Boulez is now the only one left to keep reminding us of the significance of this precept.

Ultimately, Miles' complaint to Taylor had to do with "young guys" trying to perform without adequate education. Piatigorsky was up against the same problem. Has this situation improved? As usual, it depends which end of the telescope you use to examine the situation. When I hang out at master classes taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I encounter all sorts of imaginative strategies that direct students away from the details in the notation and towards the more subtle details concerned with performance. This reinforces me when I then confront so much of the junk that is now out there on the Internet by those who are better at self-promotion than they are in cultivating a "self" worth promoting! Unfortunately, quality is not its own reward. (Has it ever been?) Even Conservatory students with the richest of experiences will have to encounter the necessity of self-promotion in the world the Internet has made; but at least they will be going into that world with something that adds to, rather than repeats, the conversation!

Remembering Rostropovich

I first heard the news of Rostropovich's death on my XM BBC feed, so I made it a point to check out the story on the Web site. My one opportunity to hear Rostropovich in concert was at a recital he gave in Singapore. I was particularly delighted that he included the cello version of Schnittke's "Suite in the Old Style." On the surface this appears as sentimental nostalgia, and I suspect that it is still heard that way by most audiences everywhere. However, Schnittke had a sarcastic streak in his nostalgia that Rostropovich handled with politic delicacy, making it clear only to those who knew how to hear it. Programming an anti-authoritarian like Schnittke in Singapore involved a certain amount of risk, but the risk was a subtle one that Rostropovich handled with aplomb.

The BBC announcer tried to portray Rostropovich as an artist who preferred to avoid politics but could not always do so. Find this hard to believe on the basis of his own reflection of the letter he wrote to Pravda in support of Solzhenitsyn back in 1970:

The best step was not found in music, but in one page of this letter. Since that moment my conscience was clean and clear.

I think it would be fairer to say that Rostropovich was strongly political without being blatant about it. That was the spirit in which he introduced Singapore to Schnittke.