Not just one of great cellists of all time, but a seemingly indefatigable life-force whose ebullient personality, virtuosic technique and shining integrity made an indelible impression on everyone he met, Mstislav Rostropovich will be remembered as one of the most dynamic musicians of the 20th century.

In his heyday his playing had an astonishing expressive power. It is no coincidence that he inspired some of the greatest composers of the 20th century — and particularly his close friends Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten — to write some of their most masterly music for him. In all he premiered 120 works as a cellist, and 70 as a conductor.

But that is just half the story of his life. Born and brought up in Stalin’s Soviet Union, he later became one of its most outspoken and courageous dissidents. His decision in 1969 to invite the ostracised author Alexander Solzhenitsyn to live in his dacha, and then to write a letter to Pravda complaining about official harrassment of the physicist Andrei Sakharov, led to his being blacklisted in Russian concert-halls and forbidden from performing abroad.

In 1974 he and his wife, the Bolshoi star soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, fled to the West — an act that led to his being stripped of his Soviet citizenship for “acts harmful to the prestige of the USSR”. That, however, was far from his last contact with Russian politics. In 1991 he rushed back to Moscow to join Yeltsin in the besieged White House. Later, he was outspoken in his attack on the super-rich oligarchs of “new” Russia, and made herculean efforts on behalf of a medical charity to relieve suffering among Russia’s poorest children.

A human dynamo who charged between six homes and survived on four hours’ sleep a night, “Slava” continued to be a huge force in music-making — particularly in London with the LSO and in Washington DC with the National Symphony Orchestra — until illness struck him last year. Though his conducting technique was idiosyncratic and sometimes indecipherable, he became a peerless interpreter of the orchestral works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, largely because he understood so well the tormented personalities and political turmoil out of which the music had sprung.

But it is for his magnificent cello playing that he will be chiefly remembered. In London he once played a dozen of the most challenging 20th-century cello concertos in the course of a single fortnight. Few other living instrumentalists would have dared even to contemplate such a task. None would have infused the music with the white-hot intensity and huge sense of humanity that Rostropovich brought to everything he did in life.

Times Recommends

• Zardari still has to tackle tough questions
• Material evidence 'debunks' Turin Shroud
• BBC criticised over Uganda gay execution poll