In 1942, the city we now call St Petersburg had been under siege by Nazi troops for months. With hundreds of thousands starving to death and the prospect of victory looking bleak, Soviet leaders tried what might now seem an unlikely attempt to salvage morale: they commissioned Dmitri Shostakovich to compose a grand symphony. The jaw-dropping true story of how Shostakovich’s seventh symphony was eventually performed is brought to life by Marina Frolova-Walker, a professor of music history at the University of Cambridge. The Russian music journalist and academic Artemy Troitsky goes on to recount how the triumph of the so-called Leningrad Symphony against all odds has today become a key part of Vladimir Putin’s mythology for Russia