Sankt-Peterburgskaya Gosudarstvennaya Akademicheskaya Filarmoniya Im. D.d. Shostakovicha
Grand nineteenth-century concert hall where a starving orchestra premiered a symphony of wartime defiance.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic centers on August 9, 1942, when conductor Karl Eliasberg raised a shaking arm inside this hall to begin a symphony almost nobody thought could be played, in a city under siege and starving. It follows the scramble to assemble an orchestra for Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, written partly here before the composer's evacuation, when Eliasberg needed about a hundred musicians and could find only around fifteen, some carried in from hospital beds and military bands. At the first rehearsal that March, players collapsed from hunger before getting through the piece, and three did not live to see opening night.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Mikhailovsky Theatre
Nineteenth-century opera and ballet house with silver, velvet and crystal interiors on a grand arts square.
Mariinsky Theatre
Grand nineteenth-century opera and ballet house with a horseshoe-shaped hall famed for its acoustics.
Большой драматический театр имени Г. А. Товстоногова
Neo-baroque theater on a river embankment, remade by a legendary director into a Soviet powerhouse.
Alexandrinsky Theatre
Empire-style Imperial theatre by Carlo Rossi, site of Russia's most infamous stage premiere.
Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery
Vast World War Two burial ground of mass graves holding hundreds of thousands of siege victims, marked only by year.
Arts Square
Elegant square ringed by a palace-turned-museum, a theatre, a philharmonic hall, and an artist's preserved apartment.