Symphony concert 8

It was one of the greatest tragedies of the Second World War: on 8 September 1941, the German Army closed the blockade ring around Leningrad. The city remained surrounded for 872 days; the city lay in ruins, and a million inhabitants died. At the same time, Leningrad became the scene of one of the greatest triumphs of Soviet music: in the state of siege Dmitri Shostakovich worked on his Seventh Symphony. The work was intended to strengthen the people’s spirit of resistance. One performance took place in Leningrad on 9 August 1942, while the blockade was still in force, and was to show both residents and the world that the city could not be defeated. The score was smuggled out to New York on microfilm, from where it embarked on a triumphal march around the world. Hardly a progressive Western composer at that time still considered symphonies an up-to-date form to recount anything about the contemporary world. Decades after Mahler, Shostakovich imbued new life in the large symphonic form with his epic »Leningrad«. Thirty years after his first concert with the Gürzenich Orchestra, former Gürzenich Music Director James Conlon has selected Shostakovich’s stirring Seventhto conduct his former orchestra after many years. You will no doubt experience full “aural cinema” and an outcry against barbarity and war in this world.