Mstislav Rostropovich (27 March 1927 – 27 April 2007) was a Russian cellist, pianist and conductor, born in Baku to a cellist father (himself a former pupil of Pablo Casals) and a pianist mother. He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1943, studying cello, piano, composition and conducting under teachers including Dmitri Shostakovich, and won the gold medal at the Soviet Union’s first competition for young musicians in 1945 at age 18. In 1974, after years of tension with Soviet authorities, he left the USSR with his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and their daughters, and was later stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, Rostropovich inspired and commissioned an extraordinary body of new cello repertoire from composers including Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten, expanding the instrument’s repertoire more than any cellist before or since. In 1969 he sheltered dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at his dacha, an act that contributed to his eventual exile and made him an international symbol of artistic freedom during the Cold War; he went on to serve as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 1994.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mstislav_Rostropovich