Cellist and conductor; Born March 27, 1927; Died April 26, 2007.

Mstislav Rostropovich - the glorious Slava, as he was nicknamed - was the most exuberant and big-hearted of cellists, the obverse of the pensive, perhaps even greater, Pierre Fournier, and for the public at large he was the man who spectacularly bridged the gap between Pablo Casals and Yo-Yo Ma.

Although in modern times his outsized musical personality came to seem outmoded in the music of Bach, in which Pieter Wispelwey, Paulo Pandolfo and other members of the new school of playing have surpassed him, it was Rostropovich - who else could it have been? - who performed Bach's suites at the base of the Berlin Wall when it was dismantled.

As a friend of Solzhenitsyn and the most famous of anti-communist musical activists, who left the Soviet Union in 1974 with Galina Vishnevskaya, his soprano wife, Rostropovich was unlikely to have missed his Berlin opportunity.

His political pluck had long engaged the attention even of those who never heard him play. Stripped of his citizenship in 1978 by the authorities, he had it restored after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was in a Moscow hospital - after spending large portions of his life in Paris and Washington - that he died of cancer aged 80.

He had been ailing for some time and was no longer the figure he had once been, though Vladimir Putin honoured him last month with a birthday party at the Kremlin. Scotland, fortunately, had heard him in his heyday, playing Bach's complete suites at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, an event for which he gave his services free.

That was the great Shostakovich year, presided over by Lord Harewood, in which Rostropovich partnered Benjamin Britten in Shostakovich's Sonata for cello and piano as well as in Britten's own Cello Sonata, specially written for him in 1961. Theirs was one of the great creative friendships, which resulted also in Britten's Cello Symphony, one of the masterpieces of modern cello music, and the three suites for solo cello, which today take their place alongside Bach's in the cello repertoire.

But Rostropovich's Scottish appearances did not stop there. In 1964, he was back at the Edinburgh Festival, playing Schumann's Cello Concerto in its Shostakovich arrangement with Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra and all five Beethoven cello sonatas in a single programme with Sviatoslav Richter.

The Beethoven programme was not unfraught. Rostropovich had arrived off a night train with the conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, who was also appearing that year. Finding their hotel rooms not yet ready, they disappeared in ill-humour and had to be searched for all over town. Then Richter arrived from Russia a week late and, after a row with the BBC, the players vented their spleen on the technicians by rehearsing the music super-pianissimo and at treble speed. The recital was eventually given at midnight on a different day.

The one time I met Rostropovich was that year, at an Edinburgh party, where he could speak to me only in Russian or German, and I was ill-equipped to converse.

He also came to the 1976 Edinburgh Festival, conducting the RSNO in the opening concert at the Usher Hall. The programme included Dvorak's New World Symphony and Britten's Cantata Academica with the Festival Chorus (Vishnevskaya sang Verdi's Lady Macbeth with Scottish Opera the following night).

Richter did not appear that time, and indeed by then their rapport was dwindling. By 1990 Richter was calling Rostropovich an "almost" great cellist, was refusing to forgive him for his mutilation of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra, and had things to say about him "falling over himself" to please Herbert von Karajan in a recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto.

Yet despite his lesser moments, Rostropovich was a master of the art of musical exhilaration. In a single season he could play 32 different cello concertos from memory with the London Symphony Orchestra in London and New York, treating his audience to one of his extraordinary cello circuses in which he combined the "roles of ringmaster, lion-tamer, high-wire artist and performing seal".

He toured the world with Haydn's rediscovered Cello Concerto in C major, complete with new and fascinating cadenzas composed by Britten. If the finale was played at what sounded like triple speed, it was not through exasperation but sheer brio. He had the ability to transform a monstrosity of a performance into a masterpiece of ferocious playing.

An Edinburgh programme of Italian baroque concertos - a mere five of them, which by his standards seemed meagre - was advertised simply as Rostropovich with Strings. He would not get away with that now. Or would he? In his determination to serve music in his own eager and flamboyant way, he swept all obstacles - including Soviet Russia - aside. In saying this of him, perhaps, one is saying everything.