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Rostropovich has a distinctly colloquial talent for giving instructions to the orchestra. For a crisp pizzicato, he says: "I want hear champagne corks popping." For a soft passage: "Before the sound is coming, smell some bee-oo-tee-fool flowers." For a lyrical passage: "You don't say 'I LOFF YOU!' You whisper [cuddling an imaginary violin] 'I LOFF YOU.' " For a subito forte (to play suddenly loud): "Imagine you with your girl friend. Suddenly your wife come into room. That is subito forte!"
Despite such engaging ways, many musicians and critics complain that Rostropovich takes too many liberties with his music, both at the cello and on the podium. Cellist Starker, whose style is considerably cooler and more disciplined than Slava's, deplores -"the personal approach that disregards the composer and stresses the feelings of the individual." It is not that Rostropovich insists upon sending his disregards to the composer; he simply hears phrases, colors and rhythms that nobody else hears. The result is that when he conducts, his soloist's gift for subtlety sometimes deserts him. In Vienna two years ago, he gave a radically nontraditional performance of that proud Viennese national resource, Die Fledermaus. It was almost predictable that a Russian might fail to exploit the sassy, lighthearted flavor of the classic, and sure enough, Rostropovich's overloaded Bat crashlanded into a nest of snapping critics, who almost declared war on the Soviet Union. Wrote the International Herald Tribune's David Stevens in one of the more merciful reviews: "A Slavic sour cream lay over the proceedings in place of Viennese schlag." In defense, Slava argued that he could easily have conducted a conventional Fledermaus, but had thought it "frivolous" to do so. "Anyway," he added, "who can say what the right tempi are? To whom did Johann Strauss confide what is correct?"
It is an old debating point, and perhaps unresolvable. Admiringly, Conductor Seiji Ozawa says that "Slava I doesn't interpret, he feels. His music is really his character. He is conducting his life." His performances of the Schubert Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano and the Schumann Cello Concerto are typical. The phrasing and pastels of dynamics in the Schubert expose a bold lyricism that would have astonished—but probably pleased—the composer. As for the Schumann, Leonard Bernstein, who recorded the piece with Rostropovich, confesses that he would just as soon not do it again in quite the same fashion. "Slava takes enormous freedoms," says Bernstein. "He does things that one would think would simply destroy the form of the piece. But he makes it work because of the tremendous conviction and love that come over with it. The excesses and exaggerations that he applies have shocked lots of people, but with him they are fantastic." Yehudi Menuhin finds nothing surprising in such an approach. "Rubato is part of Slava's way of being," he explains. "He doesn't have to follow a dry metronomic beat. As a string player, he knows what it is to form a phrase, and this is something that not many conductors know."