[1] His father, Boris Shafran, went on to be principal cellist of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother, Frida Moiseyevna, was a pianist.

[1] His father was a serious musician and strict teacher[1] and after year and a half under his tutelage, Shafran had absorbed many of the values that he held throughout his life: diligent and regular practice and the importance of striving for the highest goals.

[1] Shafran's first public performance was at the age of 10, at one of the Conservatory concerts, where he played two technically demanding works by David Popper: 'Spinning Song' and 'Elfentanz'.

[3] His orchestral debut was a year later, when 11, when he played Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the visiting British conductor, Albert Coates.

At the age of 14, Shafran entered the 1937 USSR All-Union Competition for Violinists and Cellists, for young musicians from all Soviet states.

His age, "filigree virtuosity and poetic appearance had caused something of a sensation"[4] and Shafran achieved national prominence.

Shafran's attention to detail made him pre-eminent in miniature forms: his poetic sensibility and the remarkable palette of tone colours he had at his disposal suit him to romantic and impressionistic repertoire".

His astonishing technique in the higher register enabled him to perform a wide range of violin works at original pitch.

[5] However, he rarely toured outside the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, and virtually all his recordings were for the Melodiya label, so his international reputation was very limited.

[5] In 1950, Shafran moved to Moscow, separating him from his family and his teacher on whom he had depended for so long - an event which caused him an artistic crisis.

[1] Like so many prodigies, Shafran needed to develop into a mature artist, and his first wife and recital partner, Nina Musinian, greatly helped him in this respect,[3] encouraging him to break with his past, and find the space to experiment.

Kabalevsky was sufficiently impressed that he dedicated his Second Cello Concerto to Shafran, who gave the premiere and made the first recording in 1965.

Characteristic of his style was his inimitable rich tone (unusual on a baroque instrument), his unlimited musical freedom, and his impeccable technical proficiency.

Shafran saw himself as a product of a Leningrad (rather than a Moscow) tradition that “attached great importance to technical matters, [but] gave more attention to interpretation, revealing the stylistic diversity of works, and developing the artistic propensities of the pupil”.

For the left hand… I execute great leaps over the fingerboard with all fingers, striving for exactness of intonation and purity of sound.” To develop tone control, he would take a piece of moderate difficulty, like Rachmaninoff's 'Vocalise', and play it high on the C-string instead of the A-string.

Although he followed David Oistrakh's advice “to include a virtuoso piece in your daily dozen: the audience likes them as a reward” and he highly recommend practicing the “old bravura works for those who aspire to attain the heights of cello technique”, for himself he felt that above all his music should be sincere, and he aimed to focus on “major music” with the depth for great expression.

He achieved a very light staccato and spiccato, and he made his beautiful silvery sound using the bow at the tip far more than most cellists and liked the hair to be on the loose side.

He rehearsed in full concert dress, perched at the front of an unusually high chair, positioned on a little raised platform, and played with his eyes closed.

His vibrato, his phrasing, his rhythm all belonged to a unique whole; his astounding virtuosity conveyed a musical personality that retained the passion, the simplicity and the poetry of a great Russian folk singer.

He was a great cellist, with a distinctive tone, but whenever he played, you always had the impression that he was thinking only of the moment when he would have an interesting high note that he could hold on to and produce an attractive sound.

I stopped performing with him in 1951 and he then joined up with Grigory Ginzburg... As a musician, if not a cellist, Rostropovitch was incomparably more interesting, an artist of far greater stature.

[3] On the other hand, any Amati surviving into the present time has been rebuilt in the neck to allow for a higher bridge, and these alterations would give the instrument more carrying power and a brighter, more piercing sound than it had in the original baroque setup.