FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH

David Nice talks to Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich [photo: Sony "THESE were three kings, but absolutely from different plan ets. Each of them always tried to behave towards me as if I were an equal, paying me genuine compliments. But I knew the difference between us all the time." Rostropovich is talking about Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten—geniuses whose compliments he has been able, as loving disciple, to return in three major festivals. Our meeting took place whilst Rostropovich was passionately in the midst of the second festival, at the end of Prokofiev centenary year— conducting performances of the symphonies at white heat, and repeating his role as dedicatee of the SymphonyConcerto for cello and orchestra.

LSO players lauded his new-found sureness of conducting technique as well as a new passion in the relationship since their Shostakovich series three years earlier. He admitted that he found Prokofiev's symphonic writing much more challenging. "Because the colouring is so unusual—if tuba and flute are playing together, you must of course make sure that the tuba plays quieter and the flute louder. Like the original scores of Mussorgsky—there too you must make a little artificial the balances. For Shostakovich that's not needed: if you have a good orchestra, all you have to do is to make the dynamics that he's written." But with Prokofiev, the strangeness is intentional? "Yes, and unbelievable, for example, the way he makes his instrumentation for a melody like a chain. For example in the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony, where the clarinet and bass clarinet have the first part of the melody, then flute and bassoon have the next, and after them the violins—and it's still the same melody. But it's difficult or impossible that sixteen violins should sound like one flute. So I make sure that all instruments when they finish their part of the melody make those last notes a little bit longer."

There's a sharp anecdote to back this up, and Rostropovich baffled our interpreter by describing (and having to translate) his role in it as—pardon the Russian idiom—farting into a pond. "There's that wonderful melody in the first movement of the Cello Sonata that half-way through, instead of continuing in the same octave, continues one octave lower. And my mistake was to ask, like an idiot, why he didn't stick to the same octave—to which, of course, he replied that he could have done that if he'd wanted to. I can't forgive myself for being so stupid."

The Cello Sonata, written in 1949, marks the true beginning of Rostropovich's friendship with

Prokofiev. He first became acquainted with the composer's music a decade earlier, when he heard the extraordinary, generous theme of Zdravitsa ("Hail to Stalin") on the radio. "I quickly memorized this marvellous melody, but since I turned on the radio half-way through the performance, I didn't know the composer and I had to ask all my musical friends." In 3948, as a graduate of the Moscow Conservatoire, he resurrected Prokofiev's First Cello Concerto—though in a version for cello and piano, since the complete score had been lost—and after the performance "Prokofiev told me that he found he was still very satisfied with the musical material but that he would like to change the structure of the piece". They worked intensively together on what was eventually to become the great SymphonyConcerto. "This was after the Zhdanov trials of 'formulist' music, it was the most tragic period of his life and he was ill, but very much drawn to communication with younger people. I would come off the Street, so to speak, with all the news. If two days went by and I didn't come to see him, he'd ring up and ask if I was ill.

"He became terribly excited. He rarely composed in the evenings so as to be able to sleep at night. So it was surprising when he rang up one night and said, 'I've thought up the most wonderful melody'—and that was the one important addition, the theme he weaves above the ostinato of the second movement." After the first performance in 1951, Prokofiev changed a few details; he did not live to hear the premiere of the revised version in Copenhagen. "The fact that the work wasn't accepted in the Soviet Union was another nail in his coffin: he had thought that it was sufficiently full of melodies. So he wrote The Meeting of the Volga and the Don" for which the nearpenniless ProkoIIev actually received a commission from Soviet Radio, again largely thanks to Rostropovich—"and the Seventh Symphony, for children's radio. It's an extraordinary thing that when Prokoflev went down to children's level he always remained himself. When the Seventh Symphony was first performed, Gilds remarked to me that the lively coda was the kind of music Kabalevsky spent his whole life trying to write, but never quite made it."

In Rostropovich's intensely poignant performance of the Seventh at the Barbican, the work ended as Prokofiev intended—quietly. The tacked-on reprise of the galop was an interim measure. "He did it for the Stalin Prize money. Because there were three awards—first class: 100,000 roubles; second class: 50,000 and third: 25,000. And the conductor Samosud told him that if he added 16 bars of happy ending, he'd get the first class. So he did, reluctantly—but only for temporary purposes. Egotist conductors who like applause prefer it. But the quiet ending, in my opinion, has its own philosophy. If you write music for children, you cannot put your whole soul into the music, in the way that he did with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. At the end of the Seventh, he just melts away, like a dream or a fairy-tale, instead of proclaiming the big 'I', like Beethoven hammering a nail in at the very end. And I feel there's always one nail too many in Beethoven! But that kind of self-assertion would be completely inappropriate to Prokofiev in the Seventh Symphony."

Restoring the rightful end of Prokofiev's symphonic epilogue is one promise Rostropovich has been able to keep. He regrets as "one of the mistakes of my life" the fact that, during four years of intense collaboration with Prokofiev, he never thought of persuading him to make a proper, Nevsky-like cantata Out of the film music for Ivan the Terrible (he claims to have seen Eisenstein's Parts I and 2 "hundreds of times— not only because of the Prokofiev music but because I particularly liked the actress Ludmila Tselikovskaya, who plays Anastasia": such close acquaintance makes his insistence on the liberty-taking Michael Lankester script somewhat surprising). But his real pride remains his realization of performing, and recording (for Erato), the complete War and Peace, which Prokofiev never lived to see staged in its entirety. "That's one of the greatest miracles in my existence. I really feel that the spirit of Prokofiev has helped me to realize the unrealizable. When I did concert performances in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, I was convinced that I was going to be physically attacked by the few people I imagined staying until the end of the performance.

"The performance was in Russian, and the only Russian in the cast was Galina [Vishnevskaya]. The rest had to study the language and their pronunciation was not exactly wonderful. The men were all in white tie and tails, so the audience couldn't understand who was Napoleon and who was Kutuzov: I'd suggested that to make the Situation a little easier, Kutuzov should cover one eye when he was singing . . . I even made a speech before the concert, in French, to beg the audience not to go home after the First Act because what was to follow was much easier. But the spirit of Prokofiev must have helped because not only did nobody leave, but the performance was a great success. And then to manage the recording in a critically short time—it was one of the most marvellous periods of my life. And so the two things that I did in memory of my teachers and which will remain in my heart until I die are the [EMI] recording of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the original version and this War and Peace." For an artist who is severely critical of several of his recordings, it has to be the solemn truth. ,a-ll0