Valentina Peleggi

Valentina Peleggi is an Italian conductor who currently serves as music director of the Richmond Symphony. She appears with orchestras across the United States and Europe, leading standard orchestral and operatic repertoire. In Buffalo she conducts an all-Dvořák program pairing the Violin Concerto with the Fifth Symphony.

This program centers on Dvořák's lyrical side. The Violin Concerto in A minor opens without a long orchestral introduction, dropping the soloist in almost immediately, and moves through folk-tinged melodies that shift between wistful and dance-like. The slow middle movement is spacious and songful, giving the soloist room to linger on long melodic lines. The finale turns to a spinning, dance-derived rhythm drawn from Czech furiant and dumka traditions. The Fifth Symphony, less often heard than Dvořák's later symphonies, moves from pastoral, sunlit opening material through a stormier middle span before arriving at a triumphant close. Listeners can expect a conductor attentive to orchestral color and to the folk-dance rhythms that run through both pieces, with clear shaping of the long melodic paragraphs Dvořák writes for strings and woodwinds.