SWR Symphonieorchester / »Leningrad«

It’s always a tricky proposition to try to explain a composer’s works by looking at his biography. But in Shostakovich’s case, the music cannot be disconnected from the circumstances of the author’s life. His Seventh Symphony, first performed in 1942, was written during the blockade of Leningrad by the German army in 1941 and is a deeply distressing confession in musical form, even though – unlike the lugubrious Eighth – it finds its way to an optimistic mood in the end.