Going through some papers today, I discovered a photocopied page with the following quotation from the late Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich about Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich:

He gave me the manuscript of the First 'Cello Concerto on 2 August 1958. On the sixth I played it to him from memory, three times. After the first time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time I played not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time I think I played the Saint-Saëns concerto, but he still accompanied his concerto. We were enormously happy.