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Max is Back

Valdes returns to BPO for first time in 10 years

Former Buffalo Philharmonic music director Maximiano Valdes returns to the BPO podium this Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, November 15 and 16, to conduct the orchestra for the first time since he left his post here at the end of the 1997-1998 concert season. The program includes two of the most popular 19th-century French works in the classical concert repertoire, Gabriel Faure’s Requiem and Camille Saint-Saens Symphony No.3 in C minor, op.78 (Organ), as well as Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question.

Former Buffalo Philharmonic music director Maximiano Valdes

Born in Santiago, Chile, Max Valdes studied violin and piano at the Conservatory of Music in Santiago, continuing his studies at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he completed his diploma in piano. Deciding to concentrate on conducting, Valdes studied in Bologna, Siena, Venice, Stuttgart, and Paris, also working as a conducting fellow with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa at Tanglewood. Valdes made his North American conducting debut with the BPO in 1987 and he was immediately invited back for the following season. Appointed music director of the BPO in 1989, Valdes held the position for almost 10 years, becoming the longest serving music director in the history of the orchestra to that point.

After guest conducting in leading concert halls and opera houses throughout Europe and the Americas, in 1994 Valdes became the principal conductor and artistic director of the Symphony Orchestra of the Principality of Asturias in Spain, recently signing an exclusive contract with Naxos to record Spanish and Latin American music with his orchestra. This past February, Valdes was also named music director and principal conductor of the Puerto Rico Symphony.

Valdes’ long tenure as music director of the BPO is remembered fondly, both by patrons and by orchestra members who played under his baton. Charles Haupt, who retired a few years ago after serving as concertmaster of the BPO for more than 30 years, recently recalled, “It was great working with Max Valdes. He is a world-class conductor and a superb musician with a great love of music that came through in every note that he conducted. Max was always very amiable and very clear in his conducting style, letting the principal players in each orchestral section take care of their bowings. He had a beautiful sense of proportion as to what was important in each work that he conducted. Max truly enjoys making music, and he helped the members of the orchestra to also enjoy the experience, in no small part through his terrific sense of humor that helped make the experience fun.”

The concert opens with American composer Charles Ives’ short but very evocative 1906 work, The Unanswered Question. A true American original, Ives studied music at Yale, and then became a successful business executive while continuing to compose highly idiosyncratic works that met with little public approval in his lifetime, causing him to give up composing almost 40 years before his death in 1954. It was only in the second half of the 20th century, helped greatly by the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein, that his genius was recognized. Ives noted on the title page of the score for The Unanswered Question that while the strings play very softly throughout, “the trumpet intones ‘The Perennial Question of Existence’ several times. The woodwinds and other players become “gradually more active, faster and louder,” until “‘the Fighting Answers’ seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock ‘The Question’—and then the strife is over for a moment. After they disappear, ‘The Question’ is asked for the last time, and the strings are heard beyond in ‘Undisturbed Solitude.’” Once heard, The Unanswered Question is unforgettable.

Faure’s Requiem is very different from the grand Requiem settings of 19th-century composers such as Berlioz and Verdi, which featured overwhelmingly powerful treatments of the full Die Irae or “Day of Wrath” section of the traditional Latin text. Faure omitted that tumultuous section, making only a passing reference to it in the Libera me. The result is a work of tender lyricism that comforts and reassures the individual in the face of death, which the composer accepted as “a joyful deliverance, an aspiration towards a happiness beyond the grave, rather than a painful experience.”

These concerts are dedicated to the memory of former BPO flutist Cheryl Gobbetti Hoffman and it is hard to imagine a more appropriate memorial than a performance of the Faure Requiem.

The Symphony No. 3, or Organ Symphony, is Saint-Saens’ most popular work. The composer made use of the theories of thematic development of Liszt, to whom the work is dedicated, with the result that subjects evolve throughout the work. The unusual use of keyboard instruments, including the piano and the organ, especially in the highly exhilarating and expansive final movement, where all the stops are literally pulled out, guarantee that the audience will be on its feet the moment the music stops.

For more information, call 885-5000 or visit www.bpo.org.

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