José María Vitier Says He Is Cuban

January 10, 2022

José María Vitier declared himself blessed to be a musician on the island of music. Words born from the heart, like those he dedicated to his inspiring teachers, to the love that Silvia, his companion, and he have professed for half a century, and to the vocation of growing, resisting and dreaming in that essential Cuba that he has managed to capture in his art.

Musical scores born from the heart, from poetic sensitivity, from a sense of belonging that dialogues with this and other times, with an eye and ear toward the times to come, were abundantly presented at the Sunday event that consecrated the composer as the 2021 National Music Prize winner.

There is no doubt: there exists a Vitier seal, that of José María, just as there also exists the seal that his brother Sergio impressed, honored before with this high recognition for creation. With two words, spoken in passing at the end of the ceremony, maestro Luis Manuel Molina summarized the matter: José María is a registered trademark.

Any work of his, whether for solo instrument or voice, chamber ensemble or orchestra, conceived for an audiovisual production or concert hall, possesses distinctive signs that are revealed at first glance. Just a few measures, a brief passage or even a mere sonic hint are enough to be certain that it is a work by José María.

The program progressed from least to greatest in terms of intensity, though not in aesthetic weight. The confluence of Marcos Madrigal's piano and Niurka González's flute in Intimacy and Ballad of Adolescent Love opened the floodgates of refined lyricism.

The flutist and pianist, successively and separately, accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra, continued the journey with the third movement of the Flute Concerto and Orchestra (from Havana Concerto), End of Century Dance and Theme of the Sea, these last two derived from the soundtrack to Humberto Solás's film The Century of Enlightenment. Later the audience was transported by the memory of the main theme from Strawberry and Chocolate, engraved with fire in the memory of countless Cubans.

The Piano Concerto and Orchestra, the third part of Havana Concerto, premiered last November, is a score that condenses and at the same time expands the sound universe of a composer who builds his creation from an instrument that runs through the entire identity of the nation. How not to perceive from afar or near the traces of Ruiz Espadero, Cervantes, Saumell, Arizti, Lecuona, Guerrero, but also those of Romeu, Fariñas and Chucho. The second movement, in Madrigal's interpretation, highlighted the very rich melodic palette in its complex rhythmic framework full of identity references.

A true banquet arrived with Festive Contradanza, in which Madrigal ceded space at the piano to the author himself, at the center of a high-flying piano session overflowing with imagination, during which many of us recalled that in José María's lineage also lies the protective shade of his uncle Felipe Dulzaides, to whom the autochthonous development of jazz owes much. Four hands concluded the piece that anticipated the climax with the performance of Ave María for Cuba.

Few works like this, on the symphonic-vocal plane, contain such symbolism. Throughout its course, as if someone were cooking a new liturgical season from the sources, pulses the heartbeat of the nation, its origin and destiny, its image and projection, its reason and hope. Each time I listen to it—the clear and firm voice of Bárbara Llanes, José María's vibrant keyboard, the fullness of the orchestra, the touch of the cowbell, the beats on the drums of the iyá, the itótele and the okónkolo—the words of José Martí come to me: "I do not know what mystery of tenderness this very sweet word contains, nor what such pure flavor it has over the word man itself, which is already so beautiful, that if it is pronounced as it should be, it seems as if the air becomes like a golden halo, and it is the throne or summit of a mountain of nature. One says Cuban and a sweetness of gentle brotherhood spreads through our very being... ."