The Leo Brouwer Chamber Music International Festival is emerging as one of the most demanding of Cuba and worldwide for the quality of the guests and the repertoire it defends. It is one of the few events dedicated to this type of music that bears the name of a living artist, and it will has this year rather peculiar features.
This 5th edition will have a sui generis gala, where the leading role will be played by humor, embodied in one of its greatest Cuban exponents: Osvaldo Doimeadiós.
The 2012 National Humor Award spoke with OnCuba on what taking a responsibility like this represents.
“It is a great satisfaction to me that the maestro Leo Brouwer to make me the honor of inviting me to be part of this great family which the festival that bears his name is. If you check out the list of all who attend this event, you may realize that many of the artists participating in the event, all of global recognition, repeat their presence, and that speaks highly of the meeting. “
“One of the things that attract attention of the appointment is the force exerted by Brouwer´s personality for its inclusiveness, in my specific case with humor. As is known, humor has always been closely linked to music by being transgressor and is present in the work of important authors from around the world as Mozart and many others who have broken styles and ways of conceiving music at some point by making a musical joke, I think that the playful nature that humor has is completely in tune with the music.”
What will happen at the Festival?
During last year’s edition I panicked when the maestro gave me the responsibility to work in conjunction with Italian accordionist Marco Lo Russo and Ernán Lopes Nussa, presentation that was a great challenge and a gift for all what happened there.
For this year Brouwer increased the level and proposed me to make his finger and orchestra Concerto that he originally conceived for Alfonso Arau in the 1960s and which he interpreted together with the Musical Theatre of Havana at the time.
The fact that the maestro to choose humor to kick off the Festival, a meeting which by its nature breaks boundaries between genres, expressive manifestations and builds bridges between cultures, is a great honor. I suggested him naming the show ¨Music with class¨ because in a way it will be a music class, an interactive work that includes public participation in its dramaturgy with the delivery of questionnaires and others, but he said “no, Humor with class¨ because it will be one more way to distinguish humor. “
I appreciate the ingenuity and will of the maestro Leo Brouwer for this opportunity to dignify humor and that it is precisely this show the program selected for the Festival’s opening gala in Havana.
In the show, scheduled for September 28 th, Saturday night at the Avellaneda Hall of the National Theatre, will perform Vocal Sampling, Jorge Luis Pacheco (Pachequito), other actors of the Humor Promotion Center and the Chamber Orchestra of Havana.
But this was not the only show of the night, the evening’s program also includes fragments of ¨Una broma musical¨ (A musical joke), a piece written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to make fun of himself and of his historical moment.
Also known as ¨ Divertimento for two horns and strings, ¨the work was composed by the genius of Salzburg in 1787, and according to experts is a parody of the creations of clumsy composers contemporaries with Mozart.
