On March 5, the North Carolina Symphony will once again make its annual pilgrimage to Salisbury to provide what for many fifth-graders is their very first live classical concert.
To accommodate all of the county’s fifth-graders, two concerts will be held in Keppel Auditorium, one at 10 a.m. and the other at 12:30 p.m.
The concerts are made possible through the support of the Rowan-Salisbury School System and its PTAs, the Margaret C. Woodson Foundation Inc. and Cloninger Ford/Toyota/Scion.
The theme of the concerts is “What Makes Music MUSIC Around the World?” and includes music by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, de Falla, Debussy, Mozart and Gershwin.
Last fall, music specialists in the school system attended a workshop where they shared classroom techniques to prepare the students for this concert.
The North Carolina Symphony has one of the most extensive music education programs of any U.S. orchestra, performing more than 40 education concerts a year for students throughout the state. Their program was developed in 1945, and since the first concert in the spring of 1946, the N.C. Symphony has reached more than three million school students. The Salisbury Symphony has hosted this program every year since 1972.