By Theodore W. Libbey, Jr.

In these days of jet set conductors playing musical chairs with music directorships, ten years can seem like a long time. “Seems . . . !” scowled Hamlet once, about something else. “Nay, it is . . . .” Indeed, a lot can happen in ten years.

An orchestra can come into its own. A conductor can lay claim to authority in important areas of the repertory and establish himself among the very greatest masters of his craft. A body of musicians can develop a distinctive character in performance, can leave a positive mark on its city, and make a lasting contribution to the music of its time. All this has happened in Washington during the ten years that Mstislav Rostropovich has been music director of the National Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra has grown and flourished, achieving greater consistency in its concerts while performing at an increasingly high level of artistic distinction. Rostropovich, too, has grown and flourished, broadening the scope of his music-making while building new refinements into his interpretations. Washington has benefitted from all this, but not Washington alone. The world at large, from as far away as Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Belgrade to as nearby as New York City, is a lot more likely to think of Washington as a cultural capital today it was ten years ago, in part because of what the National Symphony has done in those cities and dozens of others under Rostropovich’s baton.

What has happened? Sportscasters call it “chemistry.” Rostropovich has rubbed off on the National Symphony, bringing the orchestra some of his exceptional star quality. More importantly, he has turned the orchestra into his own enormous instrument. The ensemble has a vastly greater range of tone color than it did ten years ago; indeed, its basic sound has changed noticeably. Brighter, more transparent, with an intense, incandescent kind of power in the climaxes rather than the dense, weighty sound of a Chicago Symphony or the shattering loudness of a New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony has become less of a Central-European-sounding orchestra and more of a Franco-Russian one. Those happen to be Slava’s tastes, and indeed they reflect the quality of his cello playing—wonderfully lithe, full of color, almost mercurial in mood.

In certain music—especially the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and also of Tchaikovsky and even of Debussy—the NSO has a sound close to the ideal. It is also, in almost all repertory, a more expressive, less conservative ensemble. The string sections now have a sense of animation and fluidity in their phrasing that was lacking ten years ago (again, the cello style!), and the situation at the solo desks reflects a dramatic improvement over a decade ago. A lot has happened.

To mark his tenth anniversary as music director, which coincides with the 60th anniversary of his birth, the National Symphony is honoring the man it (and practically everyone else in Washington) knows as “Slava” by mounting a season devoted to him—his loves, his friends, his teachers, his students, his talent, his triumphs, his dreams. Works by the two composers with whom he has been most closely associated in his multifaceted career as solo cellist, pianist, and conductor, and to whom he was deeply devoted as a friend—Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten—form the bookends of this extraordinary season. The opening program featured Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4. At the season’s conclusion, there are two works of Benjamin Britten, the celebrated War Requiem and Praise We Now Great Men, the latter commissioned for Rostropovich’s first season as music director of the NSO and left unfinished by Britten at his death. The seven-minute fragment, now orchestrated, received its premiere last summer at the Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten founded and which Rostropovich serves as an artistic director.

Slava’s first National Symphony performances of the War Requiem in 1979 were among the highlights not just of that season but of the musical lives of many who were in the audience. In my first year as music critic of The Washington Star, I was thrilled to be a witness to such an overwhelming account of one of the century’s undisputed masterpieces. Had anyone told me then that I could look forward to a repeat performance eight years later, with Galina Vishnevskaya again singing the haunting soprano solo Britten wrote expressly for her, I probably would have said, “Never . . . . This can never be equaled.” But in the last eight years I have learned never to say never when it comes to Rostropovich. He simply gets better and better.

Slava will be 60 this March, and he has made music in this country for just over 30 years. It is a remarkable career—especially when viewed against the backdrop of the grim impasse he reached in his career in the Soviet Union, described unforgettably in his wife’s stark memoirs, Galina.

In 1979, two seasons into his association with the NSO, I asked him how long he planned to be with the orchestra, because many of us wondered whether he was willing to endure the frustrations he was facing when he could perform as soloist and guest conductor virtually anywhere he wanted. “You must understand,” he told me, “that I am a long-distance runner.” It was his way of saying that he would not leave the orchestra as long as he felt there was something he could do to improve it. Something he and they could accomplish together. Now, seven years later, I and many others have heard with our ears and felt in our hearts what he meant. It was hard to know what Slava was talking about then, but if you listen to the National Symphony Orchestra when it plays for him this season, you will hear what he meant. And you will have no doubt whatever as to why MUSICAL AMERICA has chosen him, at this ten-year milestone in an extraordinary career, as Musician of the Year.

Theodore W. Libbey, Jr. is classical music editor of High Fidelity magazine, and former music critic of The Washington Star. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Kennedy Center’s Stagebill.