Marta Valdés According to the Musical Caress of Dayron Ortiz

January 26, 2023

The songs of Marta Valdés have passed (and remained forever) in the voices of unforgettable Cuban interpreters.

They continue to be performed wherever good taste reigns. They continue to transmit that delicate vision about love and heartbreak, about the incongruities of existence and silent persistence, about imagination unleashed by being in love, among other emotions, with that poetics so characteristic of the author, which has notably enriched the island's musical heritage.

Those angles toward which the lyrics and melodies of this creator oblige us to turn ourselves are by themselves sufficient to satisfy the most demanding music lovers and the great interpreters who have incorporated them into their repertoire over several generations. Marta's work continues to drag happy consequences to the present day.

Such is the case of the talented guitarist Dayron Ortiz, who on Monday night, within the framework of the Jazz Plaza Festival, in the Covarrubias Hall, ¿surprised? us with his personal appropriation of Valdés's legacy, whom he had admired since adolescence. I'm not sure it was a surprise. When it comes to Marta, beauty has reached its ceiling. Or so we believed.

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Marta Valdés appeared on stage, cane in hand and stole on her shoulder. Photos taken from La Jiribilla

The audience came to the appointment with high expectations, to welcome these new caresses to Marta's songs, with contemporary arrangements that absolutely preserve the spirit of each of the creations chosen for the show. So Dayron revealed to us another Marta who is nothing more than the same, but with radiations that were waiting to come to light.

The interpreter confesses that he has spent ten years in the company of these compositions. "I continue to listen admiringly to her explorations in music, the way she wrests surprising sound solutions from silence, and more than that, songs that are born already eternal because of the original way in which they are conceived."

What enormous satisfaction for the creator, but above all for her admirers, that her work resonates, awakens emotions and aesthetically disturbs young minds. What a pleasure to witness that it passes to other hands to continue generating beauty from admiration and collective work. For she accompanied Dayron in shaping the show, and came out to receive with him a thunderous and lengthy ovation.

It could not be any other way. An intimate show had ended, and at the same time one that brought people together. It is the sum of complicity, the saturation of beauty that radiates from good music and talented interpreters capable of discovering corners, warm passageways, burning heights, or nameless reminiscences where we thought everything had already been said.

Could there not be some music student who, from his classes and his practice with his chosen instrument, is also on his way to show us more facets of the work of one of the many great composers in our musical history? May it be so.