Ángel Vázquez Millares

Vázquez Millares, in addition to the programs he hosts that are full of didacticism and good taste, possesses a vast history to tell about his work in the field of radio broadcasting. With a voice, timbre, and intonation unmistakable for his confidence in expressing himself and more than proven musical knowledge. Vázquez Millares is the professional of day-to-day work, of everyday life, with firm criteria, at the same time free from protagonist pretensions, as happens with truly talented artists.

Ángel Vázquez Millares began his life in radio at the age of 18, in 1956, making his debut at the radio station Radio Capital Artalejo located in the "Atlantic" building, where the headquarters of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) is currently located; the radio station occupied a small space.

From there he began working at Radio García Serra, a station with equally reduced space, which was located at Prado 260. In both stations he produced programs of specialized music. From his early days at the station owned by Arturo Artalejo he had a program titled "Musical Criticism with Sleeves Rolled Up", with half an hour duration in which he made critiques of genre performances presented then in La Habana by Pro Arte Musical and the Filarmónica de La Habana.

In 1959 he moved to work at Radio García Segura, where he presented operas and zarzuelas in a program sponsored by Polar beer. These were programs that had no script, but were purely experiential, where he included musical fragments. At the same time he was a critic for the Sociedad de Música de Cámara. According to him, right there at Radio García Segura, Pedro Machado Castillo had a space to broadcast symphonic music.

It is obvious that his fondness for musical criticism did not come to him all at once; it is an interest that began to trouble him since childhood. Son of a Spanish man who loved zarzuela, with whom he attended performances at the Teatro Martí, the Teatro Nacional (now Teatro García Lorca) and the Teatro Principal de la Comedia, located next to the Hotel Sevilla in the parking lot. That musical inclination was completed with radio listening at home, especially of the cuplés, of which he remembers interpreters as brilliant as Conchita Piquer and Imperio Argentina. In the midst of such an environment, he accidentally heard symphonies and began to pursue them.

In 1948 Goar Mestre founded CMBF. When referring to radio stations that broadcast culture, he mentions CM2, from the Ministry of Education, which he personally believes is little mentioned.

Of the major events at CMBF, Maestro Vázquez Millares remembers that in 1969 the program titled "Movimiento Sinfonía" was premiered, dedicated to the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, a program that he was in charge of. Simultaneously he hosted on Radio Progreso, Monday through Friday between 5:30 and 6 in the afternoon the program "Maestros de la Música", which aired on Sundays with one hour of duration. By then he was already writing the scripts while the prominent announcer López Gómez took care of hosting.

Currently Ángel Vázquez Millares is in charge of a half-hour program dedicated to opera whose first broadcast is at 10 at night with rebroadcast the next day at 5 in the afternoon. On Sundays, also on CMBF, he broadcasts a complete operatic work at 2 in the afternoon in his well-known program "Teatro de la Ópera". Every Sunday at 9 at night we can know and enjoy his program "Zarzuelas y Operetas", not forgetting to mention "Palco en la Ópera" through the Educativo Channel.

In our timely and somewhat extensive conversation he revealed that for 3 or 4 years he studied piano, an undertaking which he abandoned upon convincing himself that he would never be a pianist. As for other studies he remembers those of History of Music and Aesthetics, among others.

I was struck by curiosity when I heard him say about his first musical criticism programs that they lacked scripts, as he himself stated: "fully experiential". When I insisted on the question he told me that "scripts were not made before, no one asked for a script to get paid. The script has become a receipt for payment". Immediately after he expressed that "there are those who need the script, and it does not seem logical to him that everyone be required to have a script, whether they need it or not; that if there is no script, then there are those who consider that the program was not done; something like the problem on paper, like the Chinese laundry train: 'little paper speaks tongue'."

Later I asked him about the work of program advisors, to which he responded that "the advisor is used when needed. He does not understand being advised by someone who does not understand what he is talking about. Radio bottles – that is how he describes these cases – and he affirms that each person must have ethics to know whether or not they can perform a position.

For a professional who has been in Radio for 57 years, it is fitting to ask him what this medium constitutes for him, to which he responded in a tacit manner:

-My life. Thanks to Radio I know classical music.

I think, and many may agree with me, that one can agree in part or in all the viewpoints of this broadcaster of exceptional and respectable trajectory; although without the least doubt and from his own perspective, these are opinions sustained in an experience and competence that few or no one would be capable of questioning. Maestro Ángel Vázquez Millares is an authority in the field of work and musical criticism of Cuban Radio.

Cuban professor Ángel Vázquez Millares, one of the greatest promoters of opera on the island, was decorated as a Knight of the Order of the Italian Star, a distinction granted by the European country.

During the opening of the XV Seminar on Italian Language, Literature and Culture in Cuba, the ambassador of that nation in La Habana, Carmine Robustelli, highlighted the coincidence of this tribute in the year of the bicentennial of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, a composer to whom Vázquez has dedicated part of his research.