Frank Fernández is reborn at the piano in Cuba

December 26, 2021

Frank Fernández is one of the few pianists with an extraordinary ability to annul time and the capacity to be reborn every time he touches a piano, which he demonstrated once again.

After such a difficult year for artists around the world due to the most unexpected of challenges: a pandemic that forced the suspension of concerts, recordings, and cast a shadow over plans and spirits, the pianist and composer once again worked his miracle in the Minor Basilica of the Convent of San Francisco de Asís, in this capital.

In that solemn place, where the instrument responds to him like to no one else, Fernández wanted to pay tribute to a great friend, the historian of the city of Havana, Eusebio Leal, whose remains rest in the very garden of the Convent.

Leal valued Frank as "an artist of transparency and mystical strength that makes us feel in advance that the soul peers at the limits of the body."

It did not seem that he was playing for the first time with the Chamber Orchestra of Havana, directed by the splendid Daiana García, the understanding bore fruit in the themes of Hope and Love from The Great Rebellion, the Gelabert Theme, and the popular Love Theme from the telenovela Tierra Brava, all authored by Fernández.

In this last one, it is worth highlighting the performance of the young Keren García on violin; it would also not be fair to ignore that the Chamber Orchestra delighted the audience on its own in the first part of the concert with a Serenade for Strings (in E minor, Op. 20) by English musician Edward Elgar.

The public's spirits were also lifted by Tell Me in Two Tempos, by Víctor García Pelegrín, and the premiere of Bossa Habana, by Cucurucho Valdés, something that Daiana García dedicated emotionally to the composer's mother, Cuban piano teacher Miriam Valdés, who passed away this year from Covid-19.

The mixture of bossa nova with certain touches of mambo and jazz in such a pleasant proportion allows us to glimpse the good character of the illustrious professor, a shaper of many musical talents, daughter of Bebo Valdés and sister of the great Chucho.

With the performance of Concerto No. 23, in A Major, KV 488, for piano and orchestra, by Austrian genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, came the dialogue between pianist and orchestra.

No critic could surpass the severity of the legendary pedagogue Víctor Merzhanov, Frank Fernández's teacher at the Chaikovski Conservatory in Moscow, from which he graduated with a gold medal, and this was very clear when, already in his nineties, he testified about his student:

"For me, his interpretation of Mozart's Concerto No. 23 is one of the best I have heard in my life, and I believe Mozart wrote the second movement for him."

It was no wonder that the Cuban's commitment would be recognized in the second decade of the twenty-first century with an invitation to play the piano used by Mozart himself in the last years of his life, which is jealously preserved in his House-Museum in Salzburg.

The apotheosis occurred in the second movement, the one that Merzhanov praised in Frank, with a melancholic expressiveness that moves one to collapse, and from which he inexplicably transitions to an allegro assai, as if to glory.

Fernández's hands have offered repeated proof of his capacity to master any score, from contemporary composers to the most exalted classics. What a privilege to see him reborn each time!