Mstislav Rostropovich

Mstislav Rostropovich, who died Friday, was more than a musician; he was a person who helped change the world. He used culture as a concrete, flesh-and-blood weapon against evil. Born in what was then the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in 1927, Rostropovich was, as a cellist and conductor, one of the giants of music. Seek out his 1959 recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's first Cello Concerto, made at Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Anybody who has a problem with the way Mstislav Rostropovich conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in a program of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich tonight faces a formidable argument: His interpretations come straight from the mouths of the composers. He knew both - intimately. Shostakovich, particularly, was close. Rostropovich risked the wrath of the Soviet KGB when he smuggled out a microfilmed score of Symphony No. 13, then under scrutiny by censors, so that Eugene Ormandy could conduct the U.S. premiere here in 1970.

Mstislav Rostropovich wears a sense of history around his shoulders when he conducts the Russian repertoire. After all, he commissioned cello works from Shostakovich and Prokofiev and as a performer was at the very center of Soviet musical life. When he led the Philadelphia Orchestra Thursday, he brought an intensity and idiomatic understanding of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 that someone less connected with the source could not match. The music sounded Russian, for one thing, and not as if it were being heard in smoothed-out translation.

Thanks to the tell-all nature of the information age, there should be no mysteries left unsolved in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. The often-tortured, seemingly coded messages of this composer's greatest symphony, which premiered in 1953 as the Soviet Union recovered from war, purges and famine, are revealed on three fronts: Solomon Volkov's book Testimony, which claims the second movement is a diabolical portrait of Joseph Stalin; a recently published...

A year and a half after her breakup with rocker Tommy Lee, Pamela Anderson says being back home with him is "not all roses," but it is "not a dangerous situation" either. Anderson left her husband in 1998 after a highly publicized fight. Lee pleaded no contest to kicking his then-estranged wife several times during a fight while she held their toddler son, Dylan, now 1 1/2. In the issue of Jane magazine set to hit newsstands next month, Anderson says Lee is learning to communicate better, in part through anger-management classes.

The New School of Music in Center City died of high ideals and low administrative achievements six years ago, but Temple University is determined to make its death only a transition. Temple will hold a celebratory concert Sunday to help fund the renovation of Rock Hall, the theater named for Milton Rock, university trustee and benefactor whose original $1 million gift enabled Temple to take over the New School's programs. The concert will feature cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and Lambert Orkis, a Temple faculty member who is pianist with Rostropovich's National Symphony and his recital accompanist as well.

Most cities of cultural depth have a chamber orchestra that gives nice concerts of Handel, Haydn and Mozart. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia can do that, but more than ever, it goes for singular options. The season-opening program on Monday, for example: Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who has recently ascended from principal conductor to music director, brought his revisionist sensibility to pieces you are accustomed to hearing in the posh sonority of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 ("Scotch")

A new recital hall is being readied way up north on Broad Street - stretching the proposed Avenue of the Arts, perhaps, to new limits. It belongs to Temple University's Esther Boyer College of Music and is called Rock Hall after its benefactors Milton Rock and the late Shirley Rock. When completed in January 1994, Rock Hall, on the east side of Broad Street between Cecil B. Moore and Montgomery Avenues, will accommodate 325 listeners. It will feature state-of-the-art acoustics needed to produce videos and sound recordings, a music library, classrooms and sound-proof rehearsal rooms.

You'll never hear this from me, but certain quarters of the classical music community wonder if those all-too-durable Brahms concertos and symphonies deserve a rest - if only to give lesser-known Brahms a chance. That's what Ignat Solzhenitsyn laudably accomplished in the season finale of his Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia Monday at the Kimmel Center - and nobody should have been surprised. The guy likes missions (Mendelssohn's early string symphonies, for one). Also, the size restrictions of Chamber Orchestra promise a sound envelope (leaner strings, more clear winds)

Curtis Institute of Music is marking its 65th birthday this season, and while most of its 65 years have been retiring, it is playing a highly visible and youthful role this year. Coming out of retirement has been a long process for this school. It has, after all, quietly trained three generations of musicians whose names are now among the most notable on the concert stage and in the orchestral world. A stage full of the next generation of instrumentalists played at the Academy of Music last night in the first of the year's celebrations.

The best-of-the-year lists already have been written, but the Monday recital by cellist Alisa Weilerstein definitely belongs on one, no matter where it falls in the calendar year. A frequent concerto presence here, Weilerstein returned in a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital at the Perelman Theater - one not as consistently fine as her 2008 appearance at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, but with greater successes in unexpected places. The second half had the fun stuff: Stravinsky's amiable Suite Italienne adapted from his ballet Pulcinella , and Rachmaninoff's plush, soulful Cello Sonata in G minor . Few Rachmaninoff performances achieve pianist Inon Barnatan's sense of weight while not covering up the cellist.

You'll never hear this from me, but certain quarters of the classical music community wonder if those all-too-durable Brahms concertos and symphonies deserve a rest - if only to give lesser-known Brahms a chance. That's what Ignat Solzhenitsyn laudably accomplished in the season finale of his Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia Monday at the Kimmel Center - and nobody should have been surprised. The guy likes missions (Mendelssohn's early string symphonies, for one). Also, the size restrictions of Chamber Orchestra promise a sound envelope (leaner strings, more clear winds)

Mstislav Rostropovich, who died Friday, was more than a musician; he was a person who helped change the world. He used culture as a concrete, flesh-and-blood weapon against evil. Born in what was then the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in 1927, Rostropovich was, as a cellist and conductor, one of the giants of music. Seek out his 1959 recording of Dmitri Shostakovich's first Cello Concerto, made at Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Irrepressible, effervescent and supremely brilliant, cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, 80, died in a Moscow hospital yesterday after an extended battle with intestinal cancer. Besides being one of the great cellists of the century, he premiered some 240 new works, including the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, now one of the most-played works of its kind, which he performed for the first time in the United States with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1959. During that triumphant Cold War visit, he recorded the piece here with Eugene Ormandy conducting and the composer supervising, in what became an ongoing relationship both before and after his stormy 1974 departure from the Soviet Union.

No sensible up-and-coming cellist would make an important Philadelphia Orchestra debut under Alisa Weilerstein's circumstances. For starters, she has been shuttling between two orchestral tours - the New York Philharmonic in Japan and the Moscow State Symphony in North America. Then, she was committed to playing with Maxim Vengerov in Paris (this week) and London (next). But the few days in between those European capitals coincided with cellist Truls Mork's cancellations Friday and Saturday in Philadelphia.

Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey promises Philadelphia one of those infrequent encounters with a strong, well-chiseled personality who's familiar from recordings, but rarely seen Stateside, when he opens the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia season at the Kimmel Center Sunday and Monday. Wispelwey, 44, is at a point in his life where his performances of musically and psychologically complex works eclipse those of past masters, even Mstislav Rostropovich. Perhaps no cellist since Jacqueline du Pr? has had such a confiding relationship with the recording medium.

Most cities of cultural depth have a chamber orchestra that gives nice concerts of Handel, Haydn and Mozart. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia can do that, but more than ever, it goes for singular options. The season-opening program on Monday, for example: Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who has recently ascended from principal conductor to music director, brought his revisionist sensibility to pieces you are accustomed to hearing in the posh sonority of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 ("Scotch")

Thanks to the tell-all nature of the information age, there should be no mysteries left unsolved in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. The often-tortured, seemingly coded messages of this composer's greatest symphony, which premiered in 1953 as the Soviet Union recovered from war, purges and famine, are revealed on three fronts: Solomon Volkov's book Testimony, which claims the second movement is a diabolical portrait of Joseph Stalin; a recently published...

Anybody who has a problem with the way Mstislav Rostropovich conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in a program of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich tonight faces a formidable argument: His interpretations come straight from the mouths of the composers. He knew both - intimately. Shostakovich, particularly, was close. Rostropovich risked the wrath of the Soviet KGB when he smuggled out a microfilmed score of Symphony No. 13, then under scrutiny by censors, so that Eugene Ormandy could conduct the U.S. premiere here in 1970.

In this era of restless artistic ambition and a shortage of conductors with star power, the beloved violinist Itzhak Perlman may fill a void as he trades his bow for a baton. You can't blame him, considering how cruel time has been to his violin technique. But you can't blame audiences for being both skeptical, in the wake of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's limited success in a similar endeavor, and encouraged, by Christoph Eschenbach's gratifying transformation from pianist to conductor.