Silly Saturday: “Alas poor Yorick!”

Saturday
This evening we went down to Cincinnati Music Hall for a concert, stopping on the way down for dinner at our favourite Thai restaurant in Hyde Park. I took a picture of the beautiful entrance hall at Music Hall, thinking that would serve as my Blip, but then returning to the car after the concert, we passed the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, with Hamlet the pig standing outside, and I realized he would be perfect for Silly Saturday! He dates back to the Big Pig Gig, a public art event in the summer of 2000, when hundreds of decorated fiberglass pigs were to be found all over the city. The pig was designed to hold a real pig skull, duplicating the graveyard scene in Shakespeare's play when Hamlet holds the skull of his friend, Yorick, but unfortunately the pig skull was stolen just days after Hamlet made his debut on the sidewalk in front of Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival theater, so now Hamlet is left holding only the lower jaw of the pig!
The concert program was great - a Mozart Piano Concerto and Shostakovich Symphony no. 7, The Leningrad, which has an amazing story behind it. Shostakovich began work on the Symphony in the middle of July 1941, as Hitlers troops were advancing on Leningrad, finishing the 30-minute first movement in about a month. The second and third movements were written after the blockade had begun, while he was serving on the fire fighting brigade at the Leningrad Conservatory. He frequently had to interrupt his work to escort his family to the bomb shelter during air raids. At the end of September, Shostakovich and his family were evacuated from the besieged city. They were flown to Moscow, and two weeks later traveled to the city of Kuibyshev, on the Volga River. He completed the final fourth movement of the Seventh Symphony - which he dedicated to the city of Leningrad - in Kuibyshev on December 27 1941. By this time the city of Leningrad was about 16 weeks into its 900-day siege by Nazi German forces, which would ultimately kill about a third of the city's pre-war population. The “Leningrad” Symphony was given its first public performance on March 5, 1942, in Kuibyshev. The Leningrad première was performed by the surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, supplemented with military performers. Most of the musicians were suffering from starvation, which made rehearsing difficult - musicians frequently collapsed during rehearsals, particularly the brass musicians. The orchestra was able to play the symphony all the way through only once before the concert. The story continued, as the score was microfilmed near Moscow, then flown to Tehran in April, and then driven to Cairo, to allow its promulgation to the West. It received its radio première in Western Europe on 22 June, in a performance broadcast by Henry Wood and the London Philharmonic, and its concert première at a Promenade concert at The Royal Albert Hall on 29 June. The North American première was broadcast from New York City on 19 July 1942 by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini.