Sankt-Peterburgskaya Gosudarstvennaya Akademicheskaya Filarmoniya Im. D.d. Shostakovicha
Grand nineteenth-century concert hall where a starving orchestra premiered a symphony of wartime defiance.
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.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.