A year into the siege of Leningrad, a haggard group of musicians defiantly — and improbably — performed Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, which was dedicated to the suffering city.

The symphony was composed during the horrific German siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), in which a million or more Soviet soldiers and civilians perished over a 28-month period that ended ...

Music Director Rossen Milanov and the Columbus Symphony begin 2019 with a performance of Shostakovich's iconic Leningrad Symphony inspired by Nazi Germany's siege of the city during World War II.

This symphony, known as the Leningrad Symphony, is the inspiration for a new and wonderful history by M. T. Anderson. As I write these words, the First Movement is approaching its end.

In the summer of 1942, Leningrad was starving. It had been under siege and bombardment by German forces for nearly a year. And yet an orchestra managed to perform a new symphony by the composer ...

Leningrad had been besieged since the Germans cut the last route out of the city on 14 September 1941. Shostakovich had started writing his symphony in mid-July 1941, as the Germans began closing in.

The siege of Leningrad's bombardment, starvation, freezing conditions and even cannibalism are described in brutal detail, for teen readers. But M.T. Anderson has never shied away from tough subjects.

click to enlarge. Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M.T. Anderson, Candlewick Press, 464 pages. $25.99.

The book begins and ends with the triumphant story of the playing of the symphony in August 1942, when the population of Leningrad was about a third of its prewar size of 2.4 million.

As for the 106-member Leningrad orchestra, it was the hit of London, which has no first-rate symphony of its own. The oldest orchestra in Russia, it is also Russia’s best.