I wake
up con un poco recaso, and earlier
than I would have liked, but I’d left the blinds open overnight to let in the
cooler evening air, and the strong Havana sun won’t let me stay asleep. So I
rouse myself with the best intentions of making a day of it in Habana Vieja—I’ve
got a growing checklist of streets, plazas, and buildings to see, and art and
cigars…—but after a shower and a coffee, I’m still feeling tired and queasy,
and with the morning heat intensifying quickly, I decide to take it easy today.
I’m not the sort of tourist to guilt myself about “wasted” moments not spent
absorbing every last quarter-inch of a foreign city. I know I won’t see
everything, but what always interests me more about new places is getting a
sense of how the people live, and spending the time at Emilio’s is just as good. And it’s
so damned hot out, I think I’d be miserable walking around the Old City.
I do
get out for lunch. El Idilio is pretty classy by paladar standards: an open-air patio with nice blue linens, the
wait staff in starched white shirts and black vests, and the chef operating a
small kitchenette in the corner of the dining area. I order a seafood medley,
and it’s really tasty: a skewer of shrimp, a slice of fish, octopus, lobster
tail, and yucca, served with a colorful Kandinsky of sauces.
The
sweltering walk to El Idilio confirms that Habana Vieja would have been
stupidly ambitious today, and especially with all of last night’s rum still
coursing through my system, maybe actually unsafe. I stop at the Hotel Nacional
on my way back home. I can’t pretend to be above the creature comforts afforded
las turistas today: the air-conditioned lobby is a balm to
my soul. I visit the business center and shell out CUC$2.50 for fifteen minutes
of internet usage; with the slow connection, it’s just enough time to
glance at my inbox and fire off two emails, one to Karen and one to my family.
Karen has already thoughtfully sent me an email over the weekend—she must know
how happy I’ll be to have it, whenever I’m able to get online, and those few
sentences are the best part of my day.
* * *
Both
concerts this afternoon are at UNEAC, in the same studio where I had my
rehearsal on Sunday. It’s a smaller space, very intimate, with no separation
between musicians and listeners, but still plenty of room to accommodate a much
smaller audience than what I’ve seen here so far. This is more akin to the
guerrilla new music events I’m used to in New York—small audience with a big
aural appetite, production value very DIY. One notable difference: back home,
you see the same faces at these events, for better or worse. Great that a
supportive community coalesces around contemporary music, but it’s definitely
a specialized niche. Here, this kind of event seems to draw all kinds. Young
and old, fellow musicians and general public, culturati and callejeros alike.
This
festival features lots of guitar, and is rekindling my old love for the
instrument, along with some regret at not keeping it up. I stopped playing—mostly,
si soy honrado, because it’s too hard—but
I also found it difficult to be inspired by the repertoire. So much elevator
music. Had I discovered earlier how much variety there was in the literature
(and that’s entirely my own failure too), I might have tried harder. The 4:00
program opens with Fabiano Borges’s Suite
brasilera, a sweet little triptych of samba movements; would never appear
on a crunchy ICE1 program, but it’s hard not to fall in love with it, and la guitarrista, Mabel González, plays it
beautifully. Even more impressive are two pieces offered by guitarist Joe Ott
Pons: Leo Brouwer’s Sonata and Pons’s own Galaxia
Espiral LB 75—both extremely clever and hyper-virtuosic.
A very
young composer, Jorge Denis Molina (he looks to me like he
might not be twenty-one) has a four-movement Sonata minima for two flutes, Homenaje
a Phillipe Glass. It’s a terrific piece. Actualmente, I prefer it to most Glass. The two flautists, Alberto
Rosas and Yiliam Rosa López, play with the same infectious energy I experienced
last night from the Orquesta de Cámara Música Eterna.
The other
highlight of the program is Maureen Reyes Lavastida’s
Tema con variaciones sobre la Canción de
cuna de un elefante, for bassoon, vibraphone, and marimba. Qué conjunto ingenioso. I have to look
up cuna later—“cradle”—and in
retrospect, I dig this piece even more.
The 6:00 program gets off to a rocky start: harpist Martha Batista
seems to have taken the stage for Hindemith’s Harp Sonata underprepared, and is,
frankly, stumbling through it pretty badly—wrong notes, stops and starts,
unsure pedal changes. She looks
pained and confused each time she falters, and when she finally gets to the
double bar, she gives Maestro Gavilán (who is sitting, alone, right in the
center of the front row, not three feet from the harpist) a sheepish,
apologetic look.
Percussionist
Eilyn Marquetti follows and kills it, oh
my god. American composer Eugene Novotney’s A
minute of news for solo snare drum is a mesmerizing rainbow of timbres
riding a smart groove; lots of mallet changes, and Marquetti, dressed like a hipster
Aunt Jemima, plays with effortless aplomb. She follows with Nebojsa Zivkovic’s Suomineito for solo vibraphone, played
from memory, and executed beautifully.
Flautist
Marineé Fernández performs Viviana Ramos’s Estudio
para tocar la Pieza, a gem of modernist expression, played with the lights
off and the flautist’s back to the audience, casting a dramatic silhouette
against her stand light.
The program ends with the young Colombiano Marius Díaz’s Popol Vuh for wind quintet, which I could have taken or left. Díaz
clearly knows how to write for winds, if he doesn’t particularly challenge them
(and he has the very fine Quinteto Ventus Habana at his disposal), but the
piece ultimately fails to move me.
Three
solo pieces as fine as anything I’d hope to hear at any new music concert in
New York—bookended by less impressive works, which I could likewise encounter at any new music
concert in New York. These two programs today leave me with two lasting
impressions, reinforcing my feelings from last night: first, that as exceptional as
Havana is, for all its strange wonder, perhaps what’s most wondrous about it es lo que no es tan excepcional. The
Cuban musicians I’ve encountered so far aren’t so isolated that they’re waiting
for us Americans and Europeans to land ashore with the two tablets. They’ve
drunk up much newer American fare than Copland. This kid wrote an homage to
Philip Glass that outclasses Glass. And the best singers and players I’ve heard
so far can rock with the best of them in the States. The story should be less that there's a robust contemporary music scene in Cuba than that there's a robust contemporary music scene–which happens to be in Cuba.
And secondly, that por mí, being in Havana, or anywhere else—immersing myself in the sights and sounds, the social fabric of this vibrant city, the blinding color, the schizophrenic architecture, todo, todo—for me, the best part of everything is still the music. I could be sitting in El Palacio de los Matrimonios, Weill Hall, UNEAC, or The Stone, but this is what I’m thirstiest for.
And secondly, that por mí, being in Havana, or anywhere else—immersing myself in the sights and sounds, the social fabric of this vibrant city, the blinding color, the schizophrenic architecture, todo, todo—for me, the best part of everything is still the music. I could be sitting in El Palacio de los Matrimonios, Weill Hall, UNEAC, or The Stone, but this is what I’m thirstiest for.
1 International Contemporary Ensemble (as uncompromisingly ass-kicking as our new music bands get).