The Greater Newburgh Symphony Orchestra (GNSO) will offer its audience “Redemption” on Saturday, May 11 at 7:30 pm at Aquinas Hall on the Mount Saint Mary College campus in Newburgh. The program features monumental works by composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Richard Wagner under the direction of Maestro Russell Ger.

“Shostakovich spent his career in and out of favor with Stalin’s all-powerful Communist Party,” said Ger. “The piece that almost landed him in a Siberian gulag was the daring opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which opens our program. He was harshly criticized in the Party newspaper Pravda, and had good reason to fear for his life, as this was the time of the Great Terror in Russia. He survived and composed his Fifth Symphony, subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism,” several years later. More conservative in nature, it met with thunderous acclaim and effectively rehabilitated his reputation. But did he mean what he wrote?”

Between the two Shostakovich compositions, the audience will hear “the bewitching tale of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde Prelude & Liebestod,” Ger continued. “With hypnotic rapture, it tells the story of illicit love and the ecstatic transformation that can come only in death. Taken together with the Shostakovich pieces, this will truly be an enthralling evening.”

In its third year of Ger’s leadership, the GNSO set new attendance records at its season-opening concert in October and second annual Holiday Concert in December, and enjoyed similar successes in February and March. The May concert is the first of four that the GNSO will offer in a 3-month period..

Tickets – Balcony $50, Reserved $40, Open $35, Senior Citizen $25 – can be purchased online or at the door. Call 913-7157 or visit newburghsymphony.org. Students are admitted free to Open seating.