The cellist, pianist and conductor Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, was born on 27 March 1927 in Baku, Azerbaijan. He joined the Moscow Conservatory in 1943 where he studied composition with Dmitry Shostakovich and won the gold medal in the first All-Soviet Music Competition at the age of 18. In 1951, he won the Stalin Prize and five years later was appointed professor of celio at the Moscow Conservatory. With his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, a leading soprano with the Bolshoi, he became one of the first Soviet 'ambassadors of culture' and made regular concert tours to the West in the 1950s and 60s. His troubles with the authorities began in 1970 when he wrote an open letter to the Soviet press in support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had just been expelled from the Writers' Union after winning the Nobel Prize. The letter was never published within the USSR; Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya were banned from foreign travel for four years
