2025.1.309

This is an EGREM canon-building compilation: an instrumental survey of the Cuban musical patrimony, packaged as numbered national heritage. The repertoire gathers the great names of early-twentieth-century Cuban song and dance — Lecuona ("La Comparsa," "Siboney"), Gonzalo Roig ("Quiéreme Mucho"), Ignacio Piñeiro ("Suavecito"), Moisés Simons, Eliseo Grenet, the danzón master Antonio María Romeu ("Tres Lindas Cubanas") — and folds in revolutionary-era patriotic numbers such as Eduardo Saborit's "Cuba, Qué Linda es Cuba" and Peñalver's "Esto es Cubano," presenting pre- and post-1959 Cuba as a single continuous canon. What makes it especially interesting is the pairing of registers: the Orquesta del Festival is led by Gonzalo Roig — the Cuban composer, conductor, and pioneer of the symphonic movement (1890–1970), author of "Quiéreme mucho" and the zarzuela Cecilia Valdés — here in one of his final recordings before his death in June 1970, while the same disc enlists the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, the new modern-jazz orchestra, to render other classics. The grand old maestro, the EGREM house orchestra, and the modern band thus appear side by side, all enlisted to reproduce the national songbook for domestic and export ("la música cubana alrededor del mundo") audiences. The criollo ornament frame the contents as heritage.

33 RPM Record

Instrumental

The Cabrera Arús family collection

Leopoldo Arús Gálvez collection

Amazon sale 5/12/2022

https://www.discogs.com/release/3702370-Various-Musica-De-Cuba-Vol-VI