2024/021: The Conductor — Sarah Quigley

2024/021: The Conductor — Sarah Quigley

The rehearsal room stretched to accommodate the music, and the music filled the whole city, and the empty fields and desolate woods beyond. It rained down on Russian and German soldiers crouched in their trenches, stripping them of both fear and purpose — and then, surely, everything would be all right again... [loc. 3948]

Another novel about the Siege of Leningrad, to follow The Lost Pianos of Siberia (not a novel, but sparked my interest in the Siege with a handful of unsettling references) and The Siege, Helen Dunmore's critically-acclaimed novel about ordinary folk and how they survived the 900-day Siege, during which over a million people died of starvation or hypothermia. The Conductor may be mistitled: it felt to me as though the central character was Shostakovich, writing his Seventh Symphony during wartime, trying to evoke the spirit of Leningrad. But I could equally argue that Karl Eliasberg, the conductor of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, is the man who makes possible the Leningrad premiere of the Seventh Symphony.( Read more... )