Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
Rostropovich took private lessons in conducting with Leo Ginzburg, and first conducted in public in Gorky in November 1962, performing the four entractes from "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" and Shostakovich's orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Songs and Dances of Death" with Vishnevskaya singing. In 1967, at the invitation of the Bolshoi Theatre's director Mikhail Chulaki, he conducted Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi, thus letting forth his passion for both the role of conductor and the opera.