Russian conductor and favourite of the Edinburgh Festival and RSNO

Born: May 4, 1931;

Died: June 16, 2018

GENNADY Rozhdestvensky, who has died aged 87, was a conductor acknowledged as a specialist in Russian music who gained a world-wide reputation for his interpretations of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. At the 1964 Edinburgh Festival, for example, he had a great success when he conducted the first performance outside the Soviet Union of Shostakovich’s 4th symphony. Rozhdestvensky had a wide musical range and was recognised as a highly cultured musician with a strong stick technique and a deep understanding of scores.

He was viewed with caution by the Soviet authorities as he courageously included in his Moscow concerts music by composers who were banned by the Communist authorities. He was a mercurial character who often wandered round an orchestra conducting during a performance. He did not believe in over-rehearsing either, once saying, “The point of rehearsal is to put together the concert ... not to give the concert.”

Gennady Nikolayevich Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow and both his parents were noted musicians. He graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in 1954 and completed his postgraduate studies at the Conservatoire firstly studying the piano and then conducting under his father. He made his Bolshoi Theatre debut in 1951, conducting Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty – attended by Stalin – before progressing through the positions of Bolshoi conductor, chief conductor and general artistic director.

He often came to Scotland and his international career, to a large extent, owed much to the renown he gained from conducting at several Edinburgh festivals and with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Rozhdestvensky came to the 1960 festival with his Leningrad Symphony Orchestra giving a thrilling concert which included Mstislav Rostropovich playing a superlative account of Shostakovich’s cello concerto. It was the height of the Cold War and tensions in Edinburgh were not easy but the composer and his conductor diffused the situation in a warm tribute to the festival. In an interview they said, “There was silence in the hall, then the response was so generous. We discovered they can get out of their chairs, or start stamping their feet, or whistle.”

There were many other visits to the festival – notably in 1964 when Rozhdestvensky conducted Rostropovich in a memorable account of the Britten cello concerto with the composer present in the Usher Hall. The concert he gave with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1981 took on a special political significance. It was the world premiere of John Tavener’s Akhmatova Requiem based on poems depicting the horrors of the Stalin era. The poems were banned in the Soviet Union and when Rozhdestvensky returned to Moscow his luggage was searched and he was given a grilling by the KGB. They found the programme for the Usher Hall concert.

He was also a favourite of RSNO audiences. Rozhdestvensky appeared with the orchestra on a number of occasions from 1988. He conducted the orchestra in an outstanding concert in 1992 which included the world premiere at the festival of Shostakovich’s Hamlet Concert scenario. In 2002 he was in charge of a triumphant concert of Liszt’s Faust Symphony with the young tenor Jonas Kaufman. Later that year Rozhdestvensky with his son Alexander performed Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.

He much enjoyed the UK – he was made an honorary CBE in 2014 – and firmly believed in the universality of music. He included works by Elgar, Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Walton in Moscow and conducted the Russian premiere of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When he became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1978 he introduced many lesser known Russian composers at The Proms and premiered Peter Maxwell Davies’s 1st Symphony. In Russia he championed music that had been ignored by the Soviets, conducting the first complete staging of Prokofiev’s huge opera War and Peace and the first authoritative revival of Shostakovich’s The Nose.

In 2000 Rozhdestvensky resigned from the Bolshoi after conducting the original version of Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler – he considered the Moscow press had been biased and hostile. He conducted many ballet performances at the Bolshoi and had several run-ins with the dancers who always complained about the tempi in the pit. With much good humour Rozhdestvensky once began a rehearsal by asking the dancers, “What would you like me to do tonight . . . too fast or too slow?”

His relationship with Soviet bureaucracy verged on the cavalier. He did what he wanted and somehow got away with it. He travelled freely and was allowed to hold posts both in the West and in Russia. “I was not repressed and I was not in the war,’’ he commented. ‘‘I am very lucky not to have been killed.”

But colleagues and management did not always find him easy. He conducted on several occasions for the Royal Opera but walked out of a new production of Massenet’s rarely heard Cherubin in 1994 without any explanation.

Affectionately known by musicians as Noddy, he had an impulsive reputation. He was excitable on the podium with his bald pate and shiny red nose making him stand out from the orchestra. But his winning and gracious smile made him popular with audiences. The tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s companion, once said of him, “Music simply poured from him.” There was an emotional intensity and daring that made all Rozhdestvensky concerts exciting and unpredictable.

Gennady Rozhdestvensky was briefly married to Nina Timofeyeva, a Bolshoi dancer, but in 1969 he married the pianist Viktoria Postnikova. She and their son survive him.

ALASDAIR STEVEN