"When one player is late because, he says, he has been burying his wife, Eliasberg snaps: ‘Make sure it’s the last time!’"

Shostakovich, Leningrad, and the greatest story ever played

Brian Moynahan's Leningrad: Siege and Symphony brings together the story of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and that of the siege of Leningrad to inspiring, heartbreaking effect

Stephen Walsh 11 January 2014

"The battle descriptions are of course atrocious, but the street scenes perhaps horrify more, because soldiers expect to suffer and die, while people going about their daily chores are simply us in another time and another country. For musicians, similarly, Moynahan’s account of the preparations for the symphony performance will ring bells that soon crack. At first the players are barely able to hold their instruments, the wind-players incapable of blowing or even forming their mouths into an embouchure.

Gradually, under Eliasberg’s unwavering moral pressure, they manage to rehearse for short stretches. Now and then a player will simply fall over; or someone will fail to turn up to rehearsal, for the one simple, irreversible reason. The musicians begin to resent the whole process. When one player is late because, he says, he has been burying his wife, Eliasberg snaps: ‘Make sure it’s the last time!’ Yet eventually, at the final rehearsal, it all suddenly comes together, and the performance is an incredible triumph, greeted by a packed Philharmonie with a standing ovation that begins even before the end of the work, as the players falter and the audience urges them on."