Ca 1 Review Leningrad
The piece called Leningrad was written by Shostakovich. It was dedicated to the city of
Leningrad, nowadays St Petersburg. It is so important, because it was written during the long
siege of Leningrad by the Germans in the Second World War. It was so extremely popular at
the time, because it was a symbol of the resistance against the German occupation and Nazi
totalitarianism. Soon after its release in the Soviet Union in march 1942, you were able to
see it in theatres in the western part of the world like London and New York. One occasion
the Soviets specially bombed the Germans so they could listen to this symphony in Leningrad
itself. Leningrad is one of Shostakovich his longest symphonies and it consists of four
movements: Allegretto, Moderato, Adagio and Allegro non troppo. The whole symphony
takes approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes
The piece is played by a large number of musicians. There were 13 Woodwinds, 21 Brasses,
12 Percussion, 1 piano and 62 String instruments. This is also the minimum it was mend to
be played by. Shostakovich clearly wanted his piece to be important and played by more
than 100 musicians. Also the String instruments were very clearly the most important part of
the piece, so that is why so many of them were there. The theme of the whole piece is
“invasion”, because the piece was written during the invasion of the Soviet Union in the
Second World War. And during the 900 days siege of Leningrad. The people didn’t have a lot
of food and water. So they searched for a way to let go their grief and they listened to this
symphony by Shostakovich, which was really important for the soldiers and civilians of the
Soviet Union to keep their morale high.
My opinion
The piece was at Saturday evening at 8 o’clock. This was already a reason that I wasn’t really
enthusiastic to go there, because there were much nicer things I could do at that time. When
we entered the Orpheus I was stunned of how big the Wegenerzaal was. It could hold
approximately 1000 people. Even though there were only 600 present. I already thought
that only old people would attend. And I was definitely surprise that there were also quite
some younger people there. When the play started everybody stood up for the conductor
and clapped. The piece started very nice and slow and then it became more loud and fast.
There was one old man with a cello who leaded the first piece for 20 minutes. What
surprised me was that he did it all by heart and didn’t need a paper to remember what he
had to play. Overall the first part was quite nice, because the music differed a lot and the
man with the cello was really good. Unfortunately there was already a pause after these 20
minutes for about 30 minutes. And then the piece continued for over an hour. The first 30
minutes of this were very spectacular, with loud and fast music pieces which I liked v