The Magnificent Maestro

All tuned up and ready to blow, the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington waited on the stage of the austere concert hall at the John F. Kennedy Center. A cheerful cherub of a man walked swiftly to the podium and smiled at the audience. His face was a pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed unremarked—except that the enraptured man on the podium was the renowned cellist and magnificent maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, the N.S.O.'s new permanent conductor, Washington's grandest new monument.

What was a nice, "serious" musician doing in a piece like this? It was an all-Bernstein program, and the composer had dedicated the overture to Rostropovich by way of acknowledging his arrival in Washington. The music was called Slava!, which is not only the Russian word for glory but Rostropovich's nickname, and it was a good way for the conductor to show Washington that he is as gifted with jazz as he is with Tchaikovsky. Rostropovich caught the spirit easily, bending his body into the music, shafting his cues with a vigorous baton, sculpting the shapes of sound with his left hand, now kneading, now pleading, now punching his fist to bring home a thunderous cluster of dissonance.

Slava had been glorying for two weeks. For his season's opening the week before, he featured Rudolf Serkin in a velvety performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, creating a sensitive orchestral accompaniment to Serkin's ethereal tonalities. For the Bernstein concert, Slava took up his own instrument, while Lenny conducted his Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened by the now familiar spectacle of Rostropovich leaping from his podium to kiss and hug every musician within reach.

Washington is of course used to spectacle, but the era of Rostropovich has no precedent, nor has it ever promised so much. For years the capital's music-lovers have felt ignored. The great performers of the world passed through for one-nighters somewhere en route between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and even downtown Cleveland. But with the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, enterprising managers began to book extended dates for the artists, and today Washington has become one of the obligatory stops for any major musician or musical group that goes on the road.