José María Vitier will premiere a symphony dedicated to La Habana in March 2020

September 2, 2019

Vitier is currently working on "two major projects": a symphonic concert for soloists that will have its world premiere in Cuba and is dedicated to the five hundredth anniversary of the town of San Cristóbal de La Habana and the completion of the music for the feature film "El mayor," by the recently deceased filmmaker Rigoberto López: these two subjects were the center of our recent dialogue.

"The concert for symphonic orchestra for soloists stems from an initiative by the delegation of the General Society of Authors and Publishers of Spain (SGAE) in Cuba, which when asked what is SGAE going to do to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Havana? took the initiative to propose and commission a work from a composer and they suggested that it could be me.

It was not my own request and I am very grateful for that generous idea. In return came the affirmative response that yes, they were willing to make a commission for a work: that means that SGAE assumes the sponsorship in terms of its creation, its subsequent performance and eventual recording. It falls to me to set that process in motion by writing the work.

Right now I am at the exact moment of putting together this work dedicated to the five hundredth anniversary of Havana. The work is conceived in terms of a project as a symphonic work and that already speaks to you of a format—symphonic format and the symphonic orchestra. What distinguishes a symphonic orchestra from a non-symphonic one is not, solely, the number, but the composition.

The symphonic orchestra has all families of instruments—strings, winds, percussion, woodwinds, et cetera. Whether there are twenty first violins or ten depends on each country, on each institution. But yes, it is a full orchestra. The commitment is to premiere it in Havana in March of 2020.

I would like to premiere it in Havana, in a recorded, public concert, and we are going to have some guest soloists, but I won't say much more. It will have several movements and a central role will be occupied by the flute and, when I say this I am referring to the best flutist Cuba has ever had not only in these times but in all times, and thank God, she is a friend of ours!, then we can use another soloist, which will be a violin, and the piano which will have a leading role as in all my music.

It is difficult to compose a work in several parts, dedicated to Havana, and that, at least, does not include a habanera: take that for granted. In the parts I am working on now, there will be a great influence of the sounds of Havana in its five centuries, that is, beginning with the things that could have sounded or been performed when musicians and music began to exist in this city. Surely, it will be a reverence to those sound sources of the first fusions that were made in our country with Spanish and African influence.

The problem is that all of that has to lead to contemporaneity and I am foreseeing that in this work there will be a tribute to genres like the contradanza and the habanera. But, inevitably, we are going to move toward more modern languages and I hope it will be a comprehensive work that will have several parts. Something like a stained-glass window, a vitral, that has several colors and is typically Havanan and colonial; I think that is what symbolizes that melting pot.

Havana is a very inspiring city, very nostalgic, and probably it won't be a triumphalist praise of Havana because I think that Havana also has to be there with its harshness, with its reality, with its present and with its hopes. There is another detail that characterizes Havana: like all ports in the world, Havana with its port is a point of arrival and departure, of stumbling; it is a point of love and heartbreak, of encounters and misencounters, of arrival and departure, it has that magic that port cities have.

I have always thought that Havana is constituted by all of us and by all those who are not here either, by all our memories, by all those who lived in it and by all those who left, by those who return or not. Havana has all that emotional fabric that, in some way, has to come out in a score that, at times, I think will be complex.

That is a challenge for me as a composer: to make a work that is intelligible, that does not renounce contemporaneity, but that also does not betray tradition.

I would not want to be seduced by any kind of megalomania: one cannot conceive of works thinking about posterity or anything like that. I firmly believe that tributes are better, the more humble they are. What I can say is that I am going to put into this work everything, everything, everything my effort at one hundred fifty percent so that Havana accepts this tribute and people feel moved and grateful.