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Edmonton Symphony Orchestra Star Conductor Cosette Justo Valdes Lights up Christmas
Cosette Justo Valdés
osette Justo Valdés is the Assistant Conductor and Community Ambassador of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Born and raised in San Germán, a small town in the Cuban Province of Holguín. She began learning piano, violin and music theory at the tender age of eight. She was sent off to boarding school by her parents who were both amateur musicians. Her mum was a dancer and a singer and her father a guitar teacher for Cuban popular music.
With very fond memories of Cuba, her passion for music comes from an inherent love for music instilled through the Russian school of music which is the system for learning music in Cuba. Her country has an intensive musical educational system for children which Cosette was able to participate in. She remembers the struggle after the Soviet Union collapsed and how she was able to survive the harshness and deprivation of the government-subsidized music boarding school. She misses Cuba, especially people dancing in the streets, the ingenuity of people to survive, and stopping by friends’ homes without notice to have an espresso/coffee together. She remembers missing her mum who sacrificed a lot to help her get through school. And she says she still misses her because she never was able to live with her mum after she left her at the age of eight.
She started conducting as a career in 2002 at the University of the Arts in La Habana, and after graduating in 2009 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Orchestral Conducting she was appointed Music and Artistic Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Oriente (OSO) in Santiago Cuba. This is Cuba’s second most important orchestra.
In 2012, Cosette was admitted to study her Masters Degree with Maestro Klaus Arp in the Mannheim Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (State University for Music & Performing Arts) in Germany, to learn more about conducting classical repertoire from the European perspective, earning her Master’s Degree in 2018. In Germany, she had the opportunity to conduct many orchestral, choral, and chamber ensembles, while remaining Music & Artistic Director of the OSO in Cuba and returning often to conduct it.
Her love for Russian composers inspired her to conduct a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 with the National Orchestra of Cuba in Havana for the first time in more than 30 years. She also organized several large projects combining the forces of the two major symphonic orchestras of Eastern Cuba, Orquesta Sinfónica de Holguín and Orquesta Sinfónica de Oriente. Cosette also brought to the OSO for the first time pieces like Shostakovich’s
CSymphonies Nos. 1 and 5, West Side Story Suite by Leonard Bernstein (in his centenary, performed in January, 2018), Symphony No. 1 by Robert Schumann, Symphony No. 5 by Felix Mendelssohn, Pulcinella Suite by Igor Stravinsky, The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, and others. She conducted concerts specifically for children to give them an opportunity to get to know an orchestra and its instruments. She also invited music students to listen to and play with chamber orchestras and/or symphony orchestras for the first time. In November 2018, she applied for the position she now holds at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. She got the job on the same day and moved to Edmonton in January 2019. Since then, the rest is history. The Edmonton Journal describes her as a ‘rising star’. But, to us she is a star. The highlights of being a Community Ambassador includes having meaningful conversations with children from different communities in Edmonton. She recollects conversations with children who are keen to learn instruments, and specially one encounter with a little girl who had lost her mum, who, after listening to Cosette tell her story, wrote a letter to the Winspear expressing how she now understands that “it is ok to miss her mum, and that she wants to be a conductor”.
