Westmoreland Symphony season finale stars piano virtuoso Maxim Lando
There’s a special energy on stage when piano virtuoso Maxim Lando sits in with the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra.
“He’s a talented young musician and a great complement to our orchestra,” said WSO Executive Director Endy Reindl. “He’s a delight and a fun person to be around, just a ball of energy.”
Lando, 18, will make his third appearance with WSO for the aptly named “Maxim Returns.” The finale of the symphony’s Front Row concert season will livestream at 7:30 p.m. Saturday from The Palace Theatre in Greensburg.
“The first time I performed with Westmoreland Symphony was when I was 16, a year after I played ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ with Lang Lang and the Cleveland Symphony (I was Lang Lang’s ‘left hand’ while he was injured that year),” Lando said. “I felt like the community welcomed me with open arms. Since then, I always feel a special connection with the orchestra.”
Lando will perform “one of the most poetic and romantic piano concertos to emerge in the era, Chopin’s E minor concerto,” said Artistic Director Daniel Meyer, who will conduct. “We particularly love Maxim’s innate musicianship and his facile virtuosity at the keyboard. He also brings a freshness and youthful enthusiasm to everything he plays; and in this early work of Chopin, these qualities will be on full display.”
“Chopin’s first piano concerto (which he really wrote after his second) is among the most touching and beautiful music ever written,” Lando said. “There truly isn’t one phrase in this concerto that doesn’t draw you in and excite your imagination. It’s mind-boggling that this man, who suffered poor health for most of his life and shied away from big publicity, could create such music that has the power to heal and transport us almost 200 years later during a worldwide pandemic.”
Stark contrasts
The concert also will feature Cindy McTee’s “Adagio” and Efraín Amaya’s “Angelica,” along with “announcements on summer programming, including outdoor concerts and hopes and plans for moving forward,” Reindl said.
“Amaya’s ‘Angelica’ is filled with a rhythmic vitality and melodic invention that owes a debt to his home country, Venezuela,” Meyer said. “In stark contrast, Cindy McTee’s ‘Adagio’ is a heartfelt tribute to the sorrow and tragedy felt after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Amaya is familiar to many in the region, having been WSO associate conductor from 1994-2007.
“I was thrilled to hear the WSO is going to be performing Angelica,” Amaya said. “The WSO, as well as the Westmoreland Youth Symphony Orchestra, were very much part of my musical life while I was living in Pittsburgh and I have many fond memories of the many friends and colleagues I had there.”
Lando, a resident of Long Island, New York, was awarded the prestigious 2020 Gilmore Young Artist Award, and was recently named Musical America’s New Artist of the Month.
He won first prize and four special prizes at the 2018 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. He opened the 2019-20 Young Concert Artists Series with recital debuts at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington, D.C., and in New York in the Peter Marino Concert at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall.
The $35 link for “Maxim Returns” can be purchased at 724-837-1850 or westmorelandsymphony.org. For a $15 discount, use the code “Piano15.”
Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .
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