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Cuba! 2002

In February, 2002, the Academy Strings Orchestra of the Music Department at the University of Alberta, with conductor Tanya Prohazka, undertook a triumphant concert tour of Cuba where they performed in Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and Havana. All the concerts were sold out, and they were greeted with enormous enthusiasm everywhere they played. In addition to the formal concerts, they also performed in a number of schools, including the University of Cienfuegos, Benny More Art Institute (for young musicians) in Cienfuegos, the International School and the National Art Institute in Havana. The concert program included both traditional String Orchestra literature, as well as a work by Canadian Juno-award winning composer Malcolm Forsyth, arrangements for string orchestra of Cuban traditional songs by a student at the University of Alberta, Aaron Gervais, and a work by Maestro Guido Lopez Gavilan, “Guaguanco”. They were accompanied on the tour by John Reid of the Canadian Music Centre, and Tom Radford of Clearwatermedia, who was filming this tour and all of its preparations, for an eventual film documentary for Canadian television called “La Frontera”.

Maestro Gavilan was the main musical connection in Cuba. He is the Vice Chairman of the National Art Institute in Havana and is conductor of the premier student String Ensemble of Cuba, “Musica Eterna”. It is due to him that Academy Strings was able to tour Cuba. The students of “Musica Eterna” are the best Cuban string students, having risen since young childhood through the ranks of the highly competitive Cuban Musical schools throughout the country. Academy Strings collaborated with “Musica Eterna” in their workshop at the National Art Institute, and in their final concert of the tour at the Basilica San Francisco in Old Havana. Guido Lopez Gavilan conducted both orchestras together in their performance of his work “Guaguanco”. Also at this concert one student from the University of Alberta, Andrew Wan, performed as soloist in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concerto “Winter” with “Musica Eterna” with Maestro Gavilan conducting. It was an extraordinary joining of the cultures of two very disparate countries through music; hence “La Frontera”.