Leningrad Revisited

Nearly 42 years ago I sat with my father in the Colorado high school band room where he was the band director. My father and I, looking for a musical instrument for me to learn. I tried several instruments until I finally settled on the French Horn as "the one" I was to pursue. One month later we moved to another town and I began playing the French Horn. Shortly thereafter I first heard Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in our living room, listening to the record with my dad many times. He loved this symphony, and I grew to love it with him. Our family moved to West Virginia where I attended junior and senior high school, but I came back out to Colorado to attend college, where I played French Horn in the Greeley Philharmonic for two years and met the man whom I would later marry.

One week ago this evening, I got to perform the one symphony I most remember listening to with my dad, in the town where I had learned to play the horn. This is amazing considering I lived in nine different houses in three states before I left home for college. I had the wonderful privilege to perform this symphony with the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Dr. Howard Skinner, under whose baton I sat in my college days. My husband of 25 years was in the horn section with me.

We played the "invasion theme" of the first movement, which I remembered so distinctly from my childhood. I was playing as loudly as I could, along with all of the orchestra, emulating the cacophony of the invading German army into Russia in 1941. But it was the closing strains of the fourth movement, the movement inspired by the hope that the Allies would eventually win the war, that brought tears to my eyes.

Dad died almost two years ago. But as I played those closing bars, the whole orchestra playing a joyous, victorious fortissimo, I gave it my all for my dad. My dad, who patiently sat in a band room while I tried out different instruments those many summers ago. I'm sure he would have found a way to be in the audience had he been alive. He would have been so proud. His "Little Bird" playing the very symphony we loved. I gave it my all and played for him.