He just turned 80 the teacher Leo Brouwer, and is still doing battle: directing orchestras, writing, teaching, conferring by half the world. Although I have followed in his footsteps since the 70s, without a doubt I missed a good part of his best stage as a guitar soloist, which occurred in the previous decade. But at least I managed to see him playing on several occasions (I remember one of them in particular, a duet with flutist Alberto Corrales, in the crowded lounge of the National Library), as well as his auditions on electroacoustic music, and some concerts that he directed In the Habana. And it was always an apprenticeship, because it confronted us with unknown pages of the national and foreign repertoire, besides overwhelming with the technical mastery of the instrument its encyclopedic knowledge about almost all the musics, its fine sense of smell to offer novelty next to the known, articulated in the same dimension<\/p>\n
Anyway, it is worth saying that it is difficult to cover (even, like) the totality of the work of Leo, who for more than 6 decades has moved in dissimilar lands, in his double condition of composer and interpreter. There is a notable part of his production focused on the guitar (acoustic, Spanish, box, as it is called), but there are also his scores for film, theater and dance, as well as for orchestras or other solo instruments (cello, flute, piano, percussion, violin); his incursion in the randomization, his performance as director of symphonic and chamber ensembles, or in front of collectives as diverse as the Musical Theater of Havana, or the Sound Experimentation Group of the ICAIC. In fact, within the same guitar has both its authorial presence, and its approach as performer of foreign pieces.<\/p>\n
I think the first thing I bought from Leo was a single that brought Commutations<\/em>, with my ridiculously meager salary (7 pesos) of recruit. They sold it in a small store inside the air base of San Antonio de los Ba\u00f1os, where I spent my military service (1976-1979). It cost a peso, and with it I gave continuity to a beginner and still rickety home collection featuring other singles (Paul McCartney & Wings, Formula V, Modules, Paul Anka, something from the New Trova) and two or three full-length albums . Later, with a difference of a few years, but always between the end of the 70s and the middle of the next decade, I made three LPs that I keep and that measure the expansive universe that drives: Leo-Irakere<\/em> (1978), From Bach to The Beatles<\/em> (1981) and Contemporaries 10<\/em> (1984). To these acetates I have added the CD Homo ludens<\/em>, recordings in .mp3, and several books about his work, including a couple of those he has written himself.<\/p>\n In my days on the radio, Brouwer was always present in my spaces. I think I programmed it a lot, in the case of music far removed from the complacent and conventional. From Bach to The Beatles<\/em> It is a record for those who like a wide and unprejudiced selection, focused on the six strings. While the elegant initial melody immediately catches, I think the juiciest thing goes to the center of the disc. In a very intelligent way Leo established an expressive flow where pieces of Baroque Europe did not clash between Latin American melodies taken from folklore, and an ancestor of jazz was combined with a British pop page, or with an appropriation of one of the most famous \u00abnanas \u00bbWritten in Cuba. The nuances, the tense or sweet attack, the perfect cadences, that expressivity that transported in time and space from a simple guitar, with no extra effects, made this album one of my favorites within the nationals for a long time. It still is. The moments that I like the most are in Sicilian<\/em>, the beautiful (and apparently, anonymous) Dance of the Altiplano<\/em>, Fool on the hill<\/em>, The entertainer<\/em> and his own One day in November<\/em>, although I like them all. For the guitarists I suppose it was a header disc; for simple music lovers like me, it became an object of worship. There are five characters that (little by little) were decisive in my predilection for that type of acoustic sound of plucked strings: Silver Hands and Sabicas (of whom there were LPs at home since my childhood), Paco de Luc\u00eda and Egberto Gismonti (both I could see them live in Havana) and Leo. I do not say it's the "more" better, or "the first place" and those sports adjectives: they are only the ones that led me to love that instrument, even though I have no idea how it is played. About Leo, I also want to remember that several Cuban rock groups approached their material.<\/p>\n