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All this served to stir the audiences, but what Washington still needed desperately was a first-class symphony orchestra of its own. From its earliest days (it was organized in 1930), the N.S.O. had its deficiencies. Some of the musicians were the sort who required 20 minutes to get the spit out of their instruments—and that was just the strings. The first two conductors, Hans Kindler and Howard Mitchell, ran the musical gamut from lackluster to mediocre. In the 1940s, a since forgotten U.S. Senator introduced the group as "the National Sympathy Orchestra." Things finally began to look up when Antal Dorati took over the N.S.O. in 1970. An accomplished musician, Dorati programmed new music, refined the orchestra's sound, gave it a sense of pride. At last, recalls one player, "we began to think of ourselves in terms of a major orchestra."
As Dorati's contract neared an end, the Kennedy Center's executive director, Martin Feinstein, persuaded the N.S.O. to invite Rostropovich in March 1975 to come in as a podium guest. And from the moment the great Russian raised his smiling stick at the long-suffering orchestra, the N.S.O.'s board of directors knew that it had found a truly upbeat conductor. Within weeks, Rostropovich was signed for a two-year contract.
What is so remarkable about Washington's good fortune is that the city has won such an inestimable prize. Slava (hardly anybody calls him Mes-stes-slav) travels on a Soviet passport, but his own country has virtually erased him and his soprano wife Galina Vishnevskaya from Soviet musical life. Reason: Slava dared to challenge the Kremlin's brutal campaign to destroy Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
What the Soviet authorities have denied to their own people Slava brings to the rest of humanity in boundless measure. He is not simply a good conductor.
At 50, he is one of this century's greatest musicians and without doubt the world's finest cellist.
Men of this stature are almost by definition buried in their art—and their egos. But Slava is unique. He has a rage to live—and to give.
He is a dynamo of love. Every stranger is his "deeerest" friend.
He pumps hands endlessly. He kisses musicians, agents, women, children, the cook and the cop and the operators of elevators, trains, phones and planes. He lives, says Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, "in a state of solidified euphoria." To Leonard Bernstein, such enthusiasm can only be defined by the original Greek meaning of the word; Slava, he says, "is possessed by the gods."
The gods smile when he sits down at the cello, and they weep to hear it sound. Boston Symphony Cellist Robert Ripley says that Slava is "absolutely extraordinary." New York's Leonard Rose, who ranks among the world's top half-dozen cellists, calls him "colossal," in a class with the great Pablo Casals, who brought the cello to its peak as a solo instrument.