Cuban orchestra heads for US
HAVANA: The jackhammer starts a few minutes into rehearsal. Break time is over as the workers continue on a stretch of narrow Calle Obrapia. When will they finish? Days? Weeks? Nobody knows. Three messy piles of cobblestones lie in front of Oratorio de San Felipe Neri, the 17th century church that’s home to the Havana Lyceum Orchestra.
It is certainly distracting, far more than an errant cellphone ring or someone in Row H with a cough. But José Antonio Méndez Padrón doesn’t storm off the stage or even pause. The young conductor, in a T-shirt, pushes on through the rat-a-tat-tat, stopping only to offer instructions to the players surrounding him on the stage.
“It’s normal here,” says Jenny Peña, a violinist in the orchestra, during a break.
This month, the orchestra, a group of gifted young musicians from Cuba, will leave the jackhammers behind to go to the US. They will play 10 concerts with Brooklyn-based pianist Simone Dinnerstein, who recruited them for her just-released Mozart in Havana album.
This marks the first tour in the US for a Cuban orchestra since Castro’s revolution. It’s also likely that the Havana Lyceum Orchestra is the first post-revolution ensemble to record for a major label – Dinnerstein is on Sony Classical – though Bogdan Roscic, the Sony executive who oversaw the project, isn’t positive and also wants to play that down.
“I’m wary of making such claims, and I also think it sort of cheapens the whole thing, makes it sound more like a stunt,” he says. “What I would say is that these are able and super-talented musicians. When you add to that a willingness to capture a special moment, it becomes magical.”
It may seem an unlikely collaboration: a group of unpaid musicians on a largely isolated island and an accomplished pianist from hipster-soaked Park Slope who doesn’t speak more than a few words of Spanish. In reality, the Mozart project makes perfect sense.
The Brooklyn that Dinnerstein, 44, grew up in was far different from the gentrified area that makes most lists as one of New York’s most desirable areas. Her father is an artist, her mother an early childhood teacher. Growing up, they didn’t have a piano in the house. Dinnerstein ( whose first name is pronounced Simona) started taking lessons at 7, and eventually her parents drained their savings to buy a piano from a shuttered nightclub for $4 000.
“As soon as I started playing,
Dinnerstein is not afraid to push at some of the conventions of the classical world
I just fell in love with it,” Dinnerstein says. She’s married to Jeremy Greensmith, a primary school teacher, and they have a son, Adrian, 15.
But she would need help. She found it first from Solomon Mikowsky, the legendary instructor who began giving Dinnerstein, then 9, lessons on Saturday mornings at the Manhattan School of Music. There were times when the Dinnersteins couldn’t afford to write him a checque. Instead, he would accept a painting from Simone.
That’s her connection to Cuba. Mikowsky, 81, was born there and left in 1955 to study at Juilliard after winning a national competition. He would eventually establish himself as a long-time instructor at the Manhattan School of Music.
And Dinnerstein, as a teenager, would work with the London-based Maria Curcio and eventually study with Peter Serkin at Juilliard, but she never forgot Mikowsky’s generosity.
She’s not afraid to poke at some of the conventions of the classical music world, including pushy conductors and the time limits allowed for rehearsals. She would deal with neither in Havana.
“We are an island,” says Padrón, who founded the orchestra in 2009. “In the good and the bad way, we are so distant of the world. We are so natural, so pure without any influence of no system or any economic situation. We don’t do it thinking about buying a house or a car after a concert. Because we know it’s impossible. We play just for fun and for love of music.”
It is not easy. Peña, the second violinist in the orchestra, says strings are so scarce in Cuba that she learned to play on an instrument using harvested telephone wire. “It was hard because I didn’t know why I had such pain in my fingers, but I didn’t stop,” she says. “I only knew I needed to play.”
Everybody in the orchestra works for free. The conductor himself gets by on about $55 (R710) a month, his combined salary as deputy director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba and for teaching at the University of the Arts in Havana. At 32, he just moved out of his parents’ house.
It was Mikowsky who recruited a group of his former students, including Dinnerstein, to perform at the piano festival he started in Havana. In 2015, she was paired with Padrón and the 45-member Lyceum Orchestra.
“I thought, I have no idea what kind of quality orchestra this will be,” she says. “I knew they had issues with finding good instruments. So, I went with very low expectations and I was just completely amazed by their playing, which was not only high quality of playing but had a kind of grace to it. I can only describe it as a sense of joy in their playing that I had really not encountered in an orchestra.”
There were challenges of recording at the Lyceum’s home, the Oratorio de San Felipe Neri church.
To minimise street noise, they scheduled recording from 11pm-3am.
“Even then, there was one time where, in a neighbouring building,” says Dinnerstein, “somebody was drilling and we had to go pay them off to stop drilling. Also we were told we had to start after 10pm because there was a very popular soap opera on at 9pm, and everybody watches it, so you would hear the sounds of everyone’s TV.”
Over three nights, they captured the collaboration on Mozart in Havana, and will take that music to the US this month.
Earlier this year, in the Havana church, Padrón led a rehearsal as the orchestra prepared for the tour.
“Don’t rush, don’t rush,” he urged at one point. He told the string section to “speak to each other” at another, and praised the violins and violas. “That’s what I need to hear,” he said.
At one point, the jackhammer stopped, a seeming stroke of good fortune. But within minutes, before the next section, it began to rumble again. The players responded with an audible groan, a few head shakes and a few resigned smiles. Then they continued to play. They had a concert coming up.