Mstislav Rostropovich, photographed in 2002. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
It is hard to believe that Mstislav Rostropovich is dead because he was such a life force. There was more energy packed inside that brain and frame than inside a hall full of more ordinary people. He was always ready to do something new, in life or in music. If ever a man lived every minute that was allotted to him, it was Rostropovich.
As Casals withdrew into an iconic old age, Rostropovich was universally acknowledged as the greatest master of the cello repertoire. His concerts were always packed to the roof with musicians, who recognised him as an artist apart. I heard him first in Manchester as a boy, playing the Dvorak concerto that he recorded so romantically so often. The last time I heard him was in Washington, playing the Canticle to the Sun that Gubaidulina wrote for him, which required him not just to play his cello but to walk around the stage to play percussion.
As in that case, a very high proportion of the cello literature of his lifetime was specifically written for him, by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Britten among others, and gradually by composers of every land and tradition. He famously gave a series of concerts in London and New York in which he played almost every concerto ever written for the cello, including many premieres and commissions. Later he concentrated on conducting, not quite reaching the incredible eminence he enjoyed as a soloist, but wholly distinctive and impassioned, beloved by orchestras and audiences.
Of course, he was a public artist too. His story, and that of his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, are indissolubly bound up with the history of Soviet music from Stalin to Brezhnev. He was a dissident who eventually became an exile, to the distress of Shostakovich and those he left behind, but in his way he was a maker of Russian history as well as a maker of Russian music. Who can live up to a life like that?
Remembering Rostropovich: Martin Kettle's favourite recordings · Dvorak Cello Concerto, with Berlin PO/Karajan · Shostakovich First Cello Concerto, with Philadelphia Orchestra/Ormandy · Britten Cello Symphony, with English Chamber Orchestra/Britten · Beethoven Cello Sonatas, with Sviatoslav Richter · Prokofiev: War and Peace (conductor) · Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (conductor)
Remembering Rostropovich: our YouTube highlights · Beethoven's Cello Sonata no 5, slow movement, with Richter · Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No 1 · Teaming up with David Ostraikh to play Brahms's Double Concerto in London, 1965 · A 1981 performance of the adagio from Haydn's Cello Concerto in C with Seiji Ozawa
