Good morning Kossacks and welcome to Morning Open Thread.
We're here every morning at 6:30 a.m Eastern time. Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanent or just once in awhile. With the autopublish feature you can set it and forget it. Quite often the diarist de jour shows up much later (like me), that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Just let us know in the comments.
I've been waiting 23 years to play Shostokovich's Symphony No. 7 again. Written as a statement against fascism, and now nicknamed the "Leningrad Symphony," it was dedicated to the people of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Over 25 million Russians died in WWII, over 1.5 million of them in Leningrad during the Siege of Leningrad.
The first time I performed this piece was in 1989 at a summer music festival, conducted by Victor Yampolsky. Victor's father, Vladimir, was one of David Oistrakh's accompanists. Victor likes to tell about how he grew up sitting under the grand piano listening to their rehearsals. He later went on to study violin with Oistrakh, eventually emigrating to the US in 1973 and later finding his way to Northwestern University, where we crossed paths. I was lucky not only to perform under his baton, but also to study orchestral excerpts with him. When he said to me one day, "So you want to go to Dallas?" in his 'theek Russian aksent' I jumped at the chance. (There is a whole series of interviews with Victor on YouTube about his experiences with Leonard Bernstein and leaving Russia. Good stuff!)
We performed it with a movie showing scenes of the horrors of the siege. During rehearsals, we heard Victor's stories about life in Soviet Russia. I can't find any of the movie, but YouTube has many performances with still photos. It's an amazing piece of music, and very physically demanding.
When I traveled to St. Petersburg in 2001, I was struck by the sheer scale of the city, and I tried to imagine trucks of supplies driving across the frozen rivers. Then it occurred to me that I have never had to suffer the horrors of war, like so many of my brothers and sisters in this world. Will we ever outgrow the desire for war?
Happy Tuesday y'all, and jibber jabber!
Pre-publish update: Anybody know anything about HR 347? If this is for real, it's pretty scary stuff. I didn't find anything about it here so far. If it's for real, we are another step closer to our own brand of fascism. What timing.
Oh, and one last thing. As you can see, I finally figured out how to embed video. I've been making it too hard. Simply copy the embed code and paste directly into the body of the diary. My mistake had been that I was trying to use the "link" button to add it as a link. Yay!