Given that box sets are too often thrown together in a last cavalier attempt to get mileage from back catalog, it's a pleasure to find one that has rhyme and reason, assembling a program that would be hard for the buyer to find on his or her own and offering a real tribute to a beloved figure. The career of cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich traversed quite a few cultural and musical junctures. He was, in turn, a hotshot, rather brash young virtuoso who emerged from the period of Soviet openness in the late '50s, a ...
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Given that box sets are too often thrown together in a last cavalier attempt to get mileage from back catalog, it's a pleasure to find one that has rhyme and reason, assembling a program that would be hard for the buyer to find on his or her own and offering a real tribute to a beloved figure. The career of cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich traversed quite a few cultural and musical junctures. He was, in turn, a hotshot, rather brash young virtuoso who emerged from the period of Soviet openness in the late '50s, a big player in the classic Russian mold in Russian and Eastern European repertory, a champion of Shostakovich and the other politically ambiguous composers of the late Soviet era, an experimenter with the Baroque before it was common to be one, a fine chamber player, an enthusiastic supporter of several different stripes of contemporary music -- and then the second half of his career, as conductor of the National Symphony in Washington, began. A set like this is a good way to get a...
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