Rodrigo García is an overflowing talent of the future

October 16, 2021

For the prestigious intellectual Alejo Carpentier, there are two types of popular music that conquered the planet in the past century: American jazz and Cuban music.

According to his opinion, this is because they are living music in action, feeding on current events, on what is evolving in each precise moment. In that sense, a young Cuban pianist of only 23 years old, like Rodrigo García Ameneiro, has just surprised the world by the mark of his remarkable qualities as a musician, being worthy of important recognitions such as the Grand Prize in the Rocky Mountain Music Competition, in August of this year, in addition to first place in the International Live Competition at Carnegie Hall, in 2018.

Evidence of this revitalizing dynamic is the recent album Generación (Producciones Colibrí), in which Rodrigo revisits the work of a generation of renowned pianists who illuminate, from their own splendor, the professional range of contemporary Cuban piano.

By selecting only pieces by Aldo López-Gavilán Junco, Alejandro Falcón, Harold López-Nussa, Roberto Carlos (Cucurucho) Valdés, and Rolando Luna, he alerts us to the audacity of this enterprising talent that does not require necessary media support, but rather sufficient ground to establish his worth.

Listening to, one after another, the ten pieces that make up the Generación album means glimpsing the skill of a pianist with clean and sure execution capable of captivating us.

In works like Miriam, by Roberto Carlos, the pianist transmits to us the delicacy of a sensitivity required for such an emotional piece, the same occurs with the beautiful melody that distinguishes the work Con su luz, by Rolando Luna, while the refined flavor of tumbao is assumed in López-Nussa's Timbeando, to close triumphantly with the complexity of López-Gavilán in Danza del dragón violeta.

Once again, faced with this brief but meritorious trajectory, we are reminded of that old saying that it is not enough to say that one wants to be an artist, because to dazzle as expected, it is necessary to have been born with such a gift, one that life has granted to personalities like Rodrigo, for the joy of those of us who admire and respect him.