Search Results: Returned 4 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 4
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2012, c2011., Adult, HarperCollins Call No: Fic Qui Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "June 1941: Nazi troops surround the city of Leningrad, planning to shell and starve its people into submission. Most of the cultural elite escape, but the famous composer Shostakovich stays behind to defend his city. That winter, the bleakest in Russian history, the Party orders Karl Eliasberg, the shy, difficult conductor of a second-rate orchestra, to prepare for the task of a lifetime: he is to organize a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, a haunting, defiant new piece that will be relayed by loudspeakers to the front lines. Eliasberg's musicians are starving and scarcely have the strength to carry their instruments, but for five freezing months, the conductor stubbornly drives them on, depriving those who falter of their bread rations. Slowly the music begins to dissolve the nagging hunger, the exploding streets, the slow deaths . . . but at what cost? Eliasberg's relationships are strained, obsession takes hold and his orchestra grows weaker. Soon, they are struggling not just to perform but to stay alive."--Publisher.
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2016., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: Fic Bar Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The book begins in 1936, with Dmitri Shostakovich petrified at the age of thirty and fearing for his livelihood and even his life. His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has just been denounced in Pravda in an article that certainly reflects the opinion of Joseph Stalin himself. Every night he waits on the landing outside his apartment, expecting NKVD agents to come and whisk him away. Shostakovich reflects on not only his predicament but also his own personal history, his parents and his various women and wives and his children, and all who are still alive themselves hang in the balance of his fate. When the interrogation he fears does eventually arrive, a stroke of luck prevents him from becoming a casualty of the Great Terror that claims so many of his friends and contemporaries--'chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped.' Still, the spectre of the government hovers over him for several further decades, forcing him to constantly weigh the merits of appeasing those in power against the integrity of his music. Barnes elegantly guides us through subsequent stages of Shostakovich's life, from being ground into the dirt under the thumb of despotism to being made to serve as a figurehead of Soviet values at a cultural conference in New York, and finally being forced into joining the Party. The trajectory of his career illuminates the evolution of the Soviet Union, with Nikita Khrushchev assuming its leadership, this providing no great joy to Shostakovich. The Noise of Time is both a heartbreaking account of a relentlessly fascinating man's experience and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of art and its place in society."--From publisher.
