Further Career
From 1977 until 1994, he was musical director and conductor of the U.S. National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, while still performing with some of the most famous musicians such as Martha Argerich, Sviatoslav Richter, Daniel Shidarov and Vladimir Horowitz. He was also the director and founder of the Rostropovich Music Festival and was a regular performer at the Aldeburgh Festival in the UK.
His impromptu performance during the fall of the Berlin Wall as events unfolded was reported throughout the world. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, although he and his family had already become American citizens.
When in August 1991 news footage was broadcast of tanks in the streets of Moscow Rostropovich responded with a characteristically brave, impetuous and patriotic gesture: he bought a plane ticket to Japan via Moscow, talked his way out of the airport at Moscow and went to join Boris Yeltsin in the hope that his fame might make some difference to the chance of tanks moving in.
In modern Russia, Rostropovich was welcomed by high officials. Having supported Yeltsin during the 1993 constitutional crisis (he also conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in Red Square at the height of the crackdown), and was also on friendly terms with Vladimir Putin.
In 1993 he was instrumental in the foundation of the Kronberg Academy and was a patron until his death. He commissioned Rodion Shchedrin to compose the opera Lolita and conducted its premiere in 1994 at the Royal Swedish Opera.
Rostropovich received many international awards, including the French Legion of Honor and honorary doctorates from many international universities. He was an activist, fighting for freedom of expression in art and politics. An ambassador for the UNESCO, he supported many educational and cultural projects. Rostropovich performed several times in Madrid and was a close friend of Queen Sofía of Spain.
Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya founded the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation, a publicly supported non-profit 501(c)(3) organization based in Washington, D.C., in 1991 to improve the health and future of children in the former Soviet Union. The Rostropovich Home Museum opened on March 4, 2002, in Baku. Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya visited Azerbaijan occasionally. Rostropovich also presented cello master classes at the Azerbaijan State Conservatory.
Together they formed a valuable art collection. In September 2007, when it was slated to be sold at auction by Sotheby's in London and dispersed, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov stepped forward and negotiated the purchase of all 450 lots, in order to keep the collection together and bring it to Russia as a memorial to the great cellist's memory. Christie's reported that the buyer paid a "substantially higher" sum than the £20 million pre-sale estimate
In 2006, he was featured in Alexander Sokurov's documentary Elegy of a life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya.
His instruments included the 1711 Duport Stradivarius, a Storioni on which he made most of his recordings and a Peter Guarneri of Venice.
Read more about this topic: Mstislav Rostropovich
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