Description

The KSO recalls the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg — Russia’s second-largest city), where and when Composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s wartime Symphony No. 7 was premiered. 

As the historic concert was broadcast throughout the city on loudspeakers, Shostakovich’s epic 7th Symphony fostered a sustaining hope within the musicians and audience in the hall, and those citizens and soldiers listening, instilling the spirit to persevere until the Nazis were driven back in January of 1944. Those attending will hear (in addition to the up-sized orchestra — 8 horns, 6 trumpets, 6 trombones), the distant sounds of bombardment prior to the concert to help imagine the conditions into which this symphony was born.

Sergei Prokoviev’s War and Peace Overture fittingly opens the program.