David Oistrakh and Rostropovich, Rostropovich and me, Oistrakh and me--we'd all played together on frequent occasions, but never all three of us at once.
The first time we found ourselves sharing the same platform was Moscow, for Beethoven's Triple concerto. It was a good concert. And it was clearly an attractive billing, as we were then invited to record the work with Karajan, with whom each of us had already worked on his own.
It was a dreadful recording and I disown it utterly. As for the actual recording sessions, I remember them only as a total nightmare.
Battle lines were drawn up with Karajan and Rostropovich on the one side and Oistrakh and me on the other. Rostropovich was falling over himself in his attempts to do everything Karajan wanted, whereas Karajan had a superficial and clearly wrong-headed view of a work that never had a good press but of which I'm personally very fond.
Among other things, the second movement was taken too far too slowly. He held back the natural flow of music. He was faking it, and neither Oistrakh nor I had any time for this. But Rostropovich had gone over to the enemy, trying to push himself forward, whereas what he has to play here is no more than figurations.
Karajan could see I wasn't happy and that Oistrakh was sulking. He asked why. I was intentionally remaining in the background, not so much to annoy him, but because I found Rostropovich so exasperating.
Suddenly Karajan decided that everything was fine and that the recording was finished. Idemanded an extra take.
'No, no', he replied, 'we haven't got time, we've still got to do the photographs'.
To him, this was more important than the recording. And what a nauseating photograph it is, with him posing artfully and the rest of us grinning like idiots.
On the whole, Karajan's behavior was not particularly attractive. One day, while we were talking, I happened to say' Ich bin ein Deutscher' (I'm a German), to which he replied: ' Also, ich bin ein Chineser.' (In that case, I'm a Chinaman).
But there are other things for which I can't forgive him. In our recording of Tchaikovsky Concerto, there's a disgraceful mistake that's due entirely to his pig-headedness. It's in the second movement, when the main theme retuens after the cadenza. He stopped conducting, although I'd specifically asked him to give me the upbeat. He obstnately refused to do what I want, which was no more than rhythmic percision. The result was this mistake, an absolute abomination.
