Maxim Returns – Season Finale
Saturday, May 1, 2021 at 7:30 p.m. Live-streamed
Cindy McTee: Adagio
Efraín Amaya: Angelica
Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1
Maxim Lando, piano
The Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra presents Maxim Returns, the season finale of its Front Row Season on May 1, 2021, at the Palace Theatre in Greensburg, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The digital concert will be live-streamed and features Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Cindy McTee’s Adagio, and Efraín Amaya’s Angelica.
“We are thrilled to welcome back audience favorite Maxim Lando to perform one of the most poetic and romantic piano concertos to emerge in the era, Chopin’s E minor concerto. 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, said Daniel Meyer, Artistic Director. “We will pair this concerto with two works written by contemporary North American composers. Amaya’s Angelica is filled with a rhythmic vitality and melodic invention that owes a debt to his home country, Venezuela. In stark contrast, Cindy McTee’s Adagio is a heartfelt tribute to the sorrow and tragedy felt after the attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Composer Efraín Amaya is a familiar name to many in the region. “I was thrilled to hear the WSO is going to be performing Angelica, as many of you may know, I’m not new to the WSO since I was the Associate Conductor to the WSO for 13 years from 1994 to 2007. 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,” he said.
American pianist Maxim Lando makes his third appearance with the WSO. He was awarded the prestigious 2020 Gilmore Young Artist Award and was also recently named Musical America’s New Artist of the Month. He first received national attention at the age of fourteen, appearing on the piano bench alongside Lang Lang to perform the parts intended for Mr. Lang’s injured left hand.
Mr. Lando 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 in Washington, DC, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, and in New York in the Peter Marino Concert at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, which made The New York Times’s “10 Months of Classical Concerts You Won’t Want to Miss!”
