Staff reports

The Salisbury Symphony will be presenting, “The Barbarian Artist,” the fourth of four Masterworks Orchestra Performances of the Symphony’s 2024-25 season on May 3 at 7:30 p.m.

The concert will be held at Keppel Auditorium, Catawba College with Daniel Wiley, the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra director, serving as conductor.

Tickets, which are available at the door and online at salisburysymphony.org at a cost of $15 for adults, $13 for seniors, $5 for younger than 21. Tickets for the balcony are $1 and can be purchased only at the door. College students are free with college I.D.

It was shared in a release that “The Barbarian Artist” refers to the subject of a powerful Symphonic work by one of the true master composers, Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 5” actually finishes and sums up the dramatic May 3 performance.  

Wiley chose Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Petite Suite de Concert Op. 77” as an opener to “Barbarian,” and it doesn’t disappoint. A work of captivating elegance and charm, the piece smoothly blends rich Romantic harmonies with sparkling, dance-like rhythms. Opening with a grand flourish, the four movements of the piece offer the listener a flood of cascading emotions, leaving no doubt why this young African American composer was beginning to be recognized as a composing genius when he was just 21 years old and revered even among white audiences at the time… the first decade of the 1900s.

The next selection in the performance, “Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major” by Franz Liszt, is a thrilling display of technical brilliance and fiery passion, performed by the extraordinary pianist Ying Li. A graduate of the Julliard School in New York, she began piano lessons at five and has won a number of prestigious awards over the course of her life.   

“Ying Li is a positively brilliant pianist,” Wiley said. “She just performed with the Kansas City Symphony, one of the top symphonies in North America, and I still don’t know how we managed to get her to come to Salisbury!”

After a short intermission, the finale to the performance will be Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 5.” 

Renowned for its intricate layers of false patriotism and hidden political commentary, this symphony was composed under intense scrutiny from Stalin’s regime. Its stirring finale echoes an unpublished song about a “barbarian artist” whose work is thoughtlessly destroyed — likely a poignant reference to the oppressive censorship of the Soviet era at the time.

“This concert is a profound exploration of music as resistance and expression,” Wiley said, “illuminating the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression.”

The community is invited to join them for a night of powerful music and historical intrigue as we delve into the depths of artistic defiance and political subversion of “The Barbarian Artist.”