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New York
Aurelio de la Vega, one of the world's best-known Cuban composers, lives
near Los Angeles and has twice won the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, one of America's
most prestigious honors in the arts. Harold Gramatges, the most celebrated composer in
Cuba itself, lives in Havana and was given the Medal of the Underground Struggle by the
Cuban Council of State. For nearly 40 years, these two men, once friends and colleagues,
hadn't communicated -- until the American Composers Orchestra recently held its sixth and
last Sonidos de las Américas festival here, celebrating Cuban music.
Bringing them together, I
thought -- after I'd gone to public and private Sonidos events, and then visited Havana to
investigate classical music there (my report on the trip will appear in tomorrow's Weekend
Journal) -- symbolized the ACO's achievement. This, of course, is a time of tentative
rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, with baseball games, performances here by Cuban
pop and jazz musicians performances there by U.S. pop
singers, and, coming soon, concerts in Cuba by the Milwaukee Symphony, the Philadelphia
Boys Choir and a youth orchestra from the New England Conservatory.
But despite all this, the
one intractable issue is the relationship of Cubans on the island and Cuban exiles, which
made some exiles hate the ACO's plan to bring Cuban composers like Mr. Gramatges here. Mr.
de la Vega told me that he'd had phone calls urging him not to participate -- and, truth
to tell, lie himself expressed much bitterness to me about the Castro regime, and about
those who do more than merely survive under it, but willingly become part of its
apparatus.
And yet the ACO made the festival happen. A large delegation from Cuba
took part, headed by Mr. Gramatges, but including a varied cast of characters. Alfredo
Diez Nieto, for instance, is a gentleman of the old school, whose Havana home, with an
elegant small garden, seems untouched by the past 40 years of Cuban history. Juan Blanco,
though, is entirely modern, and in the '60s was Cuba's foremost musical avant-gardist; now
he's peppery and politically outspoken, not always on the side of the Castro regime.
In New York, these Cubans
(apart from Mr. Blanco) seemed hesitant, perhaps unsure of their freedom to participate.
Clearly they didn't know much about contemporary classical music anywhere outside
the old Soviet bloc. I had the odd feeling that, artistically at least, it's they who were
the exiles, and that the expatriate Cubans, like Mr. de la Vega -- or Orlando Jacinto
Garcia, from Florida International University in Miami, or Tania León, the Latin music
adviser to the ACO, who played a large role in planning the Cuban festival -- were by
contrast comfortably cosmopolitan.
No single concert at the
Sonidos festival (which in previous years had featured Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela,
Mexico and Puerto Rico) revealed much about the music the ACO's Cuban visitors had
brought. The final big splash at Carnegie Hall featured, as it more or less had to, music
by Mr. Gramatges, a precisely crafted "Serenata for String Orchestra," and by
Mr. de la Vega, a big-boned, extraverted piece, "Adiós," in an international
atonal style.
It made sense, too, to
program Ernesto Lecuona's "Rapsodia Negra,'' because Mr. Lecuona (who wrote
"Malaguena") is one of the best-known names in Cuban music, and because this
work -- whose melodies are unfortunately not quite as pointed as its rhythms and exuberant
solo piano part (wonderfully played by a Cuban exile pianist, Santiago Rodriguez) --
originally had its premiere in Carnegie Hall, back in 1943. Works by Leo Brouwer, one of
Cuba's biggest current names and Julián Obrón, an exile who died in 1991, rounded out
the evening with lots of orchestral flash, leaving no space for any younger Cubans, an
absence noted by yet another of the Cuban delegation, Juan Piñera, who in Havana
laughingly called this concert "Jurassic Park. "
Mr. Piñera, the most interesting, musically, of the Cuban delegation,
has the reputation of a dissident, and in fact spoke feelingly to me of the regime's
attempts to isolate him. He'd never leave the country, though, because to him that means
both losing himself, and accepting a foreign culture as a new kind of dictatorship. He's
so unusual, in any case, that he wouldn't fit in anywhere, except perhaps among the
advanced Cuban artists in other fields who seem to be his closest friends and colleagues.
His "El Impromptu en Fa de Federico Chopin" (Frederic Chopin's Impromptu in F),
for piano, violin, viola and cello, played at a chamber concert in Carnegie's Weill
Recital Hall, was powerful, a dreamlike transformation of Chopin's piano music into a kind
of disembodied yearning.
I also liked a neoclassical
"Concerto for Orchestra" by Jorge López Marín, which in its third movement
suddenly turns into lounge music, and "Perpetuum," for winds and a dramatic
blend of Cuban and Stravinskian percussion, by Keyla Maria Orozco Alemán (who, like many
young Cubans from educated families, is studying abroad, in her case in Holland, not for
political reasons but simply for better opportunity). These works, however, could only be
heard in private sessions, in which Cuban and American composers played tapes of their
music for each other.
Ms. Orozco's piece
exemplified something striking about Cuban classical music, that it often uses Cuban dance
rhythms. At a panel discussion on this subject, both parts of the Cuban delegation -- the
exiles and those from the island -- downplayed it, as if to say that they didn't want to
be trivialized as merely Cuban composers, with heavy emphasis on their nationality. Still,
they do use Cuban rhythms, as I saw most clearly in Havana, where I heard much more Cuban
music, and where Mr. López Marín showed me some of his manuscripts, pointing out, with
no self-consciousness, Cuban rhythmic and melodic traits. It's too bad that the U.S.
embargo on trade with Cuba has kept us from knowing more Cuban classical music; the young
American composers who now are using sounds of pop and jazz might have been encouraged and
inspired by it.
But in the end, it was politics that made the festival so memorable. On
the downside, Paquito d'Rivera, a famous Cuban exile jazz musician, denounced the
enterprise as "Communist," in the U.S. Spanish-language press. And Granma, the
Cuban newspaper, with heavy-handed Communist stupidity, wrote up the event as a triumph for the island visitors, never even mentioning the exiles
(except for one mention that crept in apparently by mistake), apart from Ms. León, who
got credit for organizing the event but wasn't named as Cuban. This hurt her to the quick.
But Juan Piñera broadcast
Mr. de la Vega's music on a radio show he hosts in Havana. Mr. Gramatges was reunited with
a former student who left the island four years ago (they hugged warmly), and with his
wife's family in a New York suburb. At a conference a week later in Miami, he and Mr. de
la Vega could reach across the bitter years of separation, and express some personal
esteem. The Ford Foundation, which helped fund the festival, was thrilled; this, said
Cristina Eguizábal, who works in the foundation's international cooperation program, was
the most public meeting yet of Cubans on both sides, a step toward ultimate
reconciliation.
And just yesterday, as if
almost still in delighted shock, Michael Geller, executive director of the ACO, said:
"I love arts management, but I never thought I'd help to do such good in something
bigger than the arts."
Wall Street Journal, May 27, 1999
Read about my visit to Havana, and
about classical music in Cuba
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