ROSTROPOVICH

posted by James Reel

    Mstislav Rostropovich has died of intestinal cancer at age 80. I won’t bother linking to any articles, because they’re everywhere you look. But I will tell you of one person who, frankly, is not sorry to see Rostropovich go.
    My friend Jeff Joneikis, owner of the mail-order company Records International, used to run a label called Russian Disc. He and his business partner, pianist-conductor Constantine Orbelian, would license recordings from the Russian agencies that succeeded the old Soviet broadcasting system and distribute them, quite legally, in the United States. The Russian Disc catalog included a good two dozen Rostropovich discs.
    Well, Rostropovich got wind of this, then got a lawyer. He claimed that Russian Disc had pirated material to which he owned the rights, and which he supposedly intended to have released by EMI. Never mind that Russian Disc had formal contracts with the post-Soviet radio archives. Never mind that the tapes in Rostropovich’s possession were mono copies of the stereo masters Russian Disc had used. The nuisance lawsuit, unfounded as it was, drove the company into bankruptcy. Jeff suspects that the lawsuit may have had less to do with rights to the tapes than with bad blood between Rostropovich and Orbelian’s father, who had nothing to do with the label. Jeff has no evidence to support this notion, though.
    So now you know why there’s one man in America who sneers when he says, “Rostropovich, the great humanitarian.”