The Richmond Symphony has renewed Valentina Peleggi’s contract as the orchestra’s music director through the 2027-28 season.
The March 2020 program that secured her Richmond appointment was the last before the orchestra had to cease performing in the early months of the Covid pandemic. When concerts resumed that fall, Peleggi and other conductors led chamber contingents of the symphony in shortened concerts before a few hundred listeners in the 1,700-seat Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center, performances that also were streamed online. A regular symphony season with full seating availability resumed in the 2021-22 season, with streams continuing.
“It is impressive and empowering to see how much we have been able to build in such a short period of time, more than half of which was during Covid,” Peleggi said in a statement issued in the orchestra’s news release on her contract renewal. “The artistic level of the orchestra [musicians], their passion, their commitment, and their will to grow is a joy to witness and a huge responsibility that I accept with even more enthusiasm.”
On her watch, the Richmond Symphony has enlarged its repertory to include works by women and composers of color, one of whom, Damien Geter, was engaged as composer-in-residence with the symphony and Virginia Opera.
Peleggi has led several premieres, with another, the “Eudaimonic” Concerto for violin and orchestra by Andrea Portera, scheduled for this season’s opening mainstage concerts on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.
“Valentina is especially passionate about drawing the emerging generation of music lovers into the symphony hall,” said Elizabeth Muhlenfeld Wollan, who chairs the Richmond Symphony board. She lauded Peleggi’s work “to build community partnerships, take concert programming to unexpected locations, and build out impactful conducting seminars and training programs.”
The Italian-born Peleggi, who studied in Rome and London, began her Richmond tenure after serving as resident conductor of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, director of its chorus and guest music director of Theatro São Pedro, the city’s opera house. She held a Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2015-17, and in 2019 was appointed associate at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
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