Omara portuondo biography of albert hall
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Date
Tuesday 19 April 2011 at 7:30pm
Location
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2A, United Kingdom
Tel: 0845 401 5045
Web: http://www.royalalberthall.com
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Link
http://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/orquestra-buena-vista-social-club/default.aspx
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Following a series of hugely successful performances in recent years, the twelve-piece Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club® which features a number of Buena Vista Social Club alumni make their eagerly awaited return to Europe.
This Cuban musicians' collective has played together for over half a century. Stylistically, they span the entire spectrum of Afro-Cuban music. Deliciously slow bolero ballads and majestic danzones feature the swell of strings, while background vocals conveying messages of romance hide behind arrestingly beautiful melodies.
Buena Vista Social Club's most influential style is the exuberant, polyrhythmic music known as son, which gave birth to both Mambo and Salsa. These upbeat numbers are full of infectious guitar licks, multilayered Afro-Cuban rhythms, soaring vocal melodies, and brash, Big Band-style horn parts.
Joining this new and expanded lineup of Cuban players is vocalist Omara Portuondo, a member of the original
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Buena Vista Social Club: The world music stars preparing to say 'Hasta la vista'
There’s just no pleasing some people. Eighty-four-year-old Omara Portuondo is the grande dame of Cuban music, with a new album about to be released, a world tour starting, fans begging to take photos with her in the hotel where we meet, a state apartment on the ocean-front Malecon, a hulking new Land Cruiser with driver, and all she can do is moan about the loss of her old Russian jalopy. What happened to the nice burgundy Lada? I ask. “Oh!” sighs Omara, “if only I could have that Lada back! I can’t drive this, it’s too big...”
Omara’s enviably rich twilight years are due essentially to one of the great global successes of the world music movement of the 1990s, the Buena Vista Social Club. In 1996, Omara – one of four original members still touring with the band – like her compatriots, was struggling under the great penury known in Cuba as the “special period”, occasioned by the collapse of Soviet economic support. With the sugar industry in ruins, Cuban music, once the most influential in the Latin world, offered one glimmer of hope.
In 1996 the guitarist Ry Cooder followed a trickle of mainly Spanish record producers to Havana and booked into the state record company Egrem’s decaying downtown
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