William Dart: Restrained tribute to Slava

He played alongside Kiri Te Kanawa and the Alagnas for the Queen's Jubilee bash, but Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has reason himself to celebrate in 2002.

The maestro is 75 and Deutsche Grammophon have responded with a handsome double CD, Mastercellist: Legendary Recordings 1956-1978.

Predictably, it's a conservative selection, launched by what is perhaps the finest of his many recordings of the Dvorak Concerto. The year is 1968 and behind him are Karajan and an ace Berlin Philharmonic (check the opening 30 seconds of the third movement for a masterly lesson in building up a texture). Restraint and clarity are the keywords here, as they are in his 1960 account of the Schumann Concerto with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic.

The remainder of this first disc dishes out lollipops and, although a 1978 recording of Tchaikovsky's Andante cantabile is a terrific showcase for Slava's sumptuous tone, be prepared for a horrific editing glitch at 46 seconds - rather hard on post-digital ears.

The second CD offers a fascinating glimpse of Rostropovich the chamber musician in the 50s. The pianist is Alexander Dedyukhin and the only substantial piece is a thrillingly uncluttered account of the Rachmaninov Sonata. The Warsaw studio has relegated the pianist severely into the background, but the compensation is the almost visceral excitement of hearing the bite of bow on the string, with pizzicati ranging from a gentle balalaika scamper to Bartokian fury.

This rest of this disc is salon music. A soupy account of Heifetz's transcription of a defenceless Schubert Impromptu may provoke a few icy reactions and Schumann's Traumerei finds Slava playing outrageously to the gallery.

With small misgivings, this is a generous selection for the price of one single CD. However, having just revisited a Southbank Show in which the cellist rehearsed and performed Penderecki's Concerto with its composer, it seems a wasted opportunity not to have a sample of this great advocate of contemporary music working in this field.

Bold adventurers should look out for the new Sofia Gubaidulina disc on ECM, featuring the cellist Boris Pergamenschikow, bajan player Elsbeth Moser and the Munich Chamber Orchestra under Christoph Poppen.

Gubaidulina's music is dark - the storm-tossed wave on the cover offers one visual simile, but I find myself relating her soundscapes to the resonant darknesses our own Ralph Hotere knows so well. On this CD her Seven Words comes across as a deeply spiritual work and Gubaidulina explains how, for her, religion is all about the restoration of connections, finding the "legato" of life.

And you can hear this when the sounds of cello and bayan (a Russian button accordion) drift across one another's paths in Seven Words, with the Munich strings chiming in with their spectral chorales.

This is a very special recording, with the composer's Ten Preludes for cello and De Profundis for solo bayan as heavenly bonuses.

* Rostropovich Mastercellist: Legendary Recordings 1956-1978 (Deutsche Grammophon 289 471 620); Sofia Gubaidulina (ECM New Series, ECM 1775)