A Hope Valley father and son’s collaboration will have its première at the 2016 Buxton Festival Fringe.
The Conductor is a dramatisation by Mark Wallington of how a concert by Dmitri Shostakovich silenced the guns of the approaching German army during the siege of Leningrad.
Wallington, who has previously written plays for radio and television, has teamed up with his musician son Daniel and two young actor friends to recreate the story of the relationship between composer Shostakovich and conductor Karl Eliasberg.
“Danny came across the story in a book by Sarah Quigley,” said Mark Wallington. “He’s just finishing his music degree at Trinity College in London and it seemed a perfect opportunity to combine my playwriting with his musicianship, and bring along a couple of fine young actors into the bargain. One of them, Sam Skelton, attended Hope Valley College with Danny.”
With most of Leningrad’s cultural elite evacuated from the city, Eliasburg set about assembling an orchestra—an almost impossible task in a city where most of the musicians were either starving or had been killed in air raids.
“The orchestra performed through hastily erected loudspeakers along the Leningrad front line. It was made up of a group of ragtag musicians who were half dead from starvation, and the result was one of the most haunting and defiant concerts ever performed.”
In this one-act drama Danny Wallington will play excerpts from the original score while Joe Skelton is the conductor. The cast is completed by Deborah Wastell.
The Conductor can be seen at the United Reformed Church, Buxton on Wednesday 20, Friday 22, Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 July at 7:30PM.