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How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world's greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his many spheres of influence, then get cellist-disciples from Rostropovich's Class 19 in the Moscow Conservatoire - here Moray Welsh, Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian and Elizabeth Wilson - to watch and listen to their mentor talking and playing. The result is a towering model of its kind.

Even without that special dimension of on-the-spot reaction to recorded music-making - one which Bridcut cultivated so successfully in his film about Elgar - this would be a moving testament. How could you possibly make boring a life which included a whirlwind wooing of another great performer - the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, always good value in interviews - resulting in a 53-year marriage, the game-changing performance of Dvorák's Cello Concerto on a Russian orchestra's troubled visit to the Albert Hall in 1968, the long-term fallout from Rostropovich's courageous defence of Solzhenitsyn and his crazy, tell-no-one arrival in Moscow without a visa to make a stand against the 1991 attempted putsch?