Today I received a recording of the Fourteenth Symphony which Shostakovich had inscribed to me. The conductor on this recording was Rostropovich, the soloists Galina Vishnevskaya and Mark Reshetin. I was particularly impressed by ‘Lorelei’, ‘The Suicide’ and ‘On Watch’, but the other movements also sounded superb. The whole performance was permeated with the extraordinary expressivity that is the hallmark of Rostropovich the cellist and Rostropovich the conductor.