Abstract

A great northern city is under siege. As it weathers its first dire winter, an orchestra of starving musicians is assembled to nourish the city with hope and the spirit of resistance. We need not look far beneath the gloss of this heroic narrative to find stories of acute desperation and moral collapse. While Maestro Prandius pushes his orchestra toward the performance of an ambitious new symphony, Bazkarian, a half-starved violinist, loses — through his own failure of courage
— his wife and daughters to the void of the state’s paranoid authority. Bazkarian struggles to restore his family. Meanwhile the orchestra of which he is a member lives its finest hour; howling their defiance from within the besieged city in a performance that echoes through the century.

Fifty years later and half a world from its birthplace, Maestra Cutwater is set to conducts an anniversary edition of the now famous symphony.

Arco - Part I is inspired by the Leningrad Radio Orchestra’s 1942 performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony under the baton of Karl Eliasberg. Once joined by Part II, the play will arch time, place and context to interrogate the heroic retellings of this story and to explore the legacies of war and extreme privation. The play contains preternatural moments that remind us of the diaphanous membrane between myth and memory, and haunt the plot with hunger’s own
hallucinatory logic. Finally, Arco is about art as a substance of nourishment and the line beyond which it can no longer save the human body. Or soul.