Baltimore Symphony Orchestra - Shostakovich: The Leningrad

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Jonathon Heyward, takes on Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”—a vast wartime work shaped by the composer’s experience of a city under siege. Heyward begins with guided excerpts and insights before the orchestra performs the complete symphony, whose sweeping scale and insistent recurring theme have come to embody endurance and resistance. First performed in 1942, the piece later became especially associated with its performance in besieged Leningrad that August. Hearing its story introduced through musical details, then unfold across the full symphony, brings the work’s history and dramatic force into focus.