fri 29/03/2024

Cuba

New Regency Orchestra, Colour Factory review - sizzling Afro-Cuban big band

Four trombones, four trumpets and five saxophones, six percussionists – this Afro-Cuban inspired band packs an irresistible punch and it’s loud!  This is a big band sound that revives the glory days of Tito Puente and Dizzy Gillespie, a 1940s...

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Blu-ray: The Cat and the Canary (1939) / The Ghost Breakers (1940)

Paramount added a late “old dark house” mystery comedy to Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939 by teaming Bob Hope with Paulette Goddard in The Cat and the Canary, skilfully directed by Elliott Nugent. The death-trap mansion in the Louisiana bayous...

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Classical CDs: Five-pointed stars, unspecified instrumentation and talented siblings

 Brahms Lieder Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (piano) (Pentatone)Ein süßes Deingedenken: A Tender Memory of Thee – Lieder by Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Kateryna Kasper (soprano), Dmitry Ablogin (piano) (TYXArt)These two...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Horn player Sarah Willis on returning to Cuba

Berlin Philharmonic Horn player Sarah Willis’s Mozart y Mambo caused a stir in 2020, its mixture of Mozart and traditional Cuban music making it a bestselling crossover disc.Two years on and the second volume has just been released, the sessions...

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Album: Camila Cabello - Familia

The global popularity of Latin music in the past few years is almost incomprehensibly huge. 2017’s “Despacito” by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi was the point where it became clear that Latin America – like South Korea – was now operating entirely on its...

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Acosta Danza, Sadler's Wells review - here comes the sun

If Carlos Acosta could have bottled the year-round sunshine of his native Cuba, he would have. Instead he did the next best thing and founded Acosta Danza. Seven years later, years which included a UK tour kiboshed by the first lockdown, when the...

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Karla Suárez: Havana Year Zero review - maths, phones and mysteries in down-at-heel Cuba

Havana, 1993. Far away, the fall of the Soviet empire has suddenly stripped Fidel Castro’s Cuba of subsidy and protection, while the US blockade strangles options for an economic reboot close to home. State-imposed “austerity” ushers in the “Special...

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Cuba: Castro vs the World, BBC Two - turbulent life and times of El Comandante

During World War Two, President Franklin D Roosevelt described the USA as “the arsenal of democracy”. Only a couple of decades later, Fidel Castro was busily turning Cuba, only 100 miles from the US mainland, into the factory of revolution,...

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theartsdesk Q&A: horn player Sarah Willis

Horn player Sarah Willis joined the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001. She juggles her position with spells of teaching, interviewing soloists and conductors for the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall and hosting an online series of Horn Hangouts...

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Acosta Danza, Sadler's Wells review - a dose of Cuban sun

Second album, second novel, second tour programme – the follow-up is always tricky. But the timing couldn’t be better for Acosta Danza, the Havana-based dance company which made its UK debut in 2017. These 20 young Cubans, handpicked by Carlos...

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The deathless Alicia Alonso, in person

The magnificent, controversial Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, who asserted that she would live to 200, died yesterday in Havana, aged nearly 99. Legends are always well protected by their own mythology, yet in 2004, when attending the Havana Ballet...

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On Your Feet!, London Coliseum review - Gloria Estefan bio-musical hits familiar notes

This well-meaning biographical jukebox musical about icons Gloria and Emilio Estefan, which did two years on Broadway and a US tour, is good summer scheduling, what with its Latin-pop bangers, infectious dance routines and “Dreams come true”...

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