Mstislav Leopol'dovič Rostropovič

Described by Julian Lloyd Webber as "probably the greatest cellist of all time", Mstislav Rostropovich's playing was celebrated all over the world. Credited with broadening the cello's popularity while expanding its range, he also made a significant mark as a conductor.

Born into a musical family in Azerbaijan (his father was also a well-known cellist and his mother a respected soprano), he played piano and cello and went on to study at Moscow Conservatory, where he later became professor of cello. He played his first cello concert in 1942, quickly becoming acknowledged as a groundbreaking master of the instrument. Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, among other leading composers, wrote concertos specifically for him. A lifelong human rights campaigner, he supported the dissident Soviet writer Alexandr Soltzhenitsyn and, in regular conflict with the Soviet authorities, left to settle in the USA and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship (it was restored in 1994). In America he became director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington between 1977 and 1994 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

On the day Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, he performed at the Proms in London with the Soviet State Symphony Orchestra, playing Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B Minor, waving the conductor's score above his head at the end as a gesture of solidarity with the Czechs. He played an impromptu concert in Berlin in 1989 to mark the fall of the Wall and was welcomed back to Russia, where he became friends with Boris Yeltsin. He also performed regularly with his wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, as well as his pianist daughter Elena, and the breadth of his work was acclaimed all over the world and he is said to have premiered 117 new compositions. Living in Paris, he died of cancer in 2007.