The pianist Sviatoslav Richter stated:"a brief association with the cellist Daniil Shafran gave me little pleasure. 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. He also suffered from nerves. 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. He dwarfed him completely."