Acclaimed as the greatest cellist at his time, Mstislav Rostropovich has also won considerable success as a conductor, appearing with many leading international orchestras, and recording operas including The Queen of Spades, Eugene Onegin, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Tosca. Between 1977 and 1994 he was Music Director at the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington, DC.

He appears regularly in the UK with British orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, with which he has collaborated on a number of major festivals, among them a twelve-concert series in 1991 celebrating the centenary at Sergey Prokofiev's birth, and two more celebrating the music of Britten (1993) and Schnittke (1994), in addition to his own seventieth-birthday series last year and a large-scale Shostakovich festival concluding this autumn.

As a cellist, he has given countless memorable performances and has inspired composers such as Britten, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Schnittke, Bernstein, Dutilleux and Lutoslawski to write works for him.

He was born into a family of distinguished cellists in Baku, USSR (now Azerbaijan), and after taking early piano lessons with his mother, he began to learn the cello with his father. continuing to study with him at the Central Music School in Moscow. He then went on to complete his studios in cello and composition at the Moscow Conservatory, and made his debut in 1942. In 1955 he married the leading soprano of the Bolshoy Opera. Galina Vishnevskaya, and since then he has accompanied her in many recitals.

An outspoken defender of human rights and artistic freedom, Rostropovich has lived in the West since 1974, giving many concerts in aid of humanitarian causes.