The Row Holding the Maximum of a Certain Column

OOo beta2 125 on MySQL 4.1.14

The OOo base manual somewhere says that the format of the SQL statement is
dependent on the format of the underlying database.

To get the maximum value for a column, MySQL allows a select statement like:

SELECT `Date` FROM `tablename`
WHERE `Date` = (SELECT MAX(date) FROM `tablename`);

However, when I cut and paste this into a Base SQL stmt I get a parse error
" Expecting 'Between' or 'In' or 'SQL_Token_Like' "

Two questions:

1
How does Base relate to the query structure of the underlying database?

2
What is the Base syntax to get the max value columns?

TIA
Gert