barnesandnoble.com: Among your closest musical colleagues was the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Was he easy to work with?

Rudolf Barshai: No one loved to rehearse as much as Richter. He was very sneaky, but in a good way, always finding different excuses to rehearse again and again.

bn.com: According to a British friend of Richter's, he suffered under the Soviet regime as a homosexual.

JZ: I do not think that Richter suffered especially because of his homosexuality; I think he was more troubled by what was happening around him politically. He was deeply disturbed by the official persecution of Boris Pasternak, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, by the death of Gumiliov, and the murder of actor Solomon Mihoels.

bn.com: You recorded Mozart Piano Concertos with Richter, Emil Gilels, and Malcolm Frager, three artists with very distinct musical personalities.

JZ: Gilels's playing was always distinguished by clear interpretation, beauty of sound, and logical phrasing. Lyricism in the slow movements was combined with sparkling energy in the opening and closing ones. Richter was a musical philosopher. He was a rare musician, belonging to those few who understood and explored the tragedy of Mozart's music. Malcolm Frager played with such fluent naturalness that it seemed that he was playing his own compositions; he was a formidable musician.

bn.com: You also worked with the violinist Leonid Kogan, who has the reputation of being a mystery man.

JZ: Kogan was a great artist, one of the greatest violinists of our century. Many of his recordings are unsurpassed. He lived a very difficult life, suffering from acute stomach ulcers. I remember he would go onstage to perform in excruciating pain, and the excitement before a concert only aggravated his pain.

bn.com: You recorded a flute concerto by composer Moysey Vainberg. Was his obscurity in the Soviet Union due to his being Jewish?

JZ: Vainberg never traveled outside of the USSR. I think he was scared of imprisonment until the end of his days. But an even greater neglected composer is Alexander Lokshin, who wrote 11 symphonies -- ten of them settings of poems banned by the Soviet government. His music is a formidable expression of strength, power, and unsurpassed beauty. Lokshin, above all, deserves to be heard and appreciated. I have recorded some of Lokshin's work and hope to do more.

bn.com: Another important musician, little-known outside Russia, is Arnold Katz, conductor of the Novosibirsk Orchestra.

JZ: I know Arnold Katz very well, a wonderful conductor. Perhaps because he is Jewish, the orchestra was not allowed to travel abroad as much as it deserved. Besides, Katz was punished for performing Shostakovitch's 13th Symphony, a composition that did not find favor with the former Soviet regime because they saw it as a challenge to the system.

bn.com: You've recently recorded Mahler's Ninth Symphony. What do you believe is the message of this work?

JZ: Mahler's music represents to me endless heartache; boundless love for life and beauty; the sorrow and joy of belief; death and resurrection.

bn.com: Speaking of questions of belief, you recorded Bach cantatas in Russia in the '60s. Wasn't their religious meaning officially taboo?

JZ: We performed them in German, and no translations were permitted for fear that audiences might understand their religious meaning. Any insinuation of religious feeling in music could lead to its being banned. A shining example is in Shostakovich's 13th Symphony, where the poet Evgeny Evtushenko was forced to change the words, "And here I am, dying on the cross, and still I bear traces of the nails".

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