By Simon Lee
Puerto Rico, by virtue of its Commonwealth status within the USA,
combines Caribbean and American lifestyles in a lush tropical
setting. One can experience the Old World in the historic city of Old
San Juan, founded in 1521; get the best of stateside mall shopping at
the Plaza de Americas just outside San Juan; party at Egipto, San
Juan's and the Caribbean's most extraordinary nightclub (much of
which is a replica of an ancient Egyptian temple complete with
Tutankhamen's gold plated mummy and waiters in fezzes) or take off
into the country where the Taino Indian and African heritage is still
much in evidence.
One of Puerto Rico's best kept secrets, at least for those in the
English speaking Caribbean is the annual Pablo Casals classical music
festival which is staged in San Juan, during June and July. The
festival founded 40 years ago by Pablo Casals, probably the most
outstanding cellist of the twentieth century, is a must for classical
music aficionados in the region, attracting some of the best
orchestras, opera stars, soloists, composers, conductors, and chamber
musicians worldwide. Nowhere else in the Caribbean can one find such
a concentration of talent over a limited time period and the Centro
de Belles Artes boasts excellent large scale and smaller auditoriums
which provide optimum acoustics.
This year the Seville Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Munich
Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Puerto Rico
Symphony Orchestra joined with acclaimed singers Simon Estes, Robert
Gambill, Gabriela Benackova, Pablo Elvira, Ana Maria Martinez, Robert
Swensen and Richard Zellers, the Prazak Quartet and a group of
soloists which included 12 year cellist Han-Na Chang, to give 18
concerts at San Juan's Luis A Ferre Fine Arts Centre.
The festival, sponsored by the Puerto Rican Tourist Board began with
Casal's most famous composition, his Christmas oratorio The
Manger. The programme also included a children's concert on June
30 with Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Poulenc's Story of
Babar the Elephant and St Saen's Carnival of the Animals.
The childrens' concert and the following concert on July 1 with
chamber musicians performing works by Bach, Mozart and Schumann both
appeared on the programme of the original festival held in 1956.
Among the concerts presented from June 22 to July 15 were chamber
concerts featuring works by Hindemith, Schubert, Beethoven and Dvorak
and J.S. Bach, symphony concerts featuring the work of modern Spanish
composers like Albeniz and Turina and such notables of the classical
tradition as Ravel, Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Haydn,
Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.
Pablo Casals the founder of the festival was known not only for his
brilliant cello playing, composing and conducting but also as a great
humanitarian and advocate of peace.
He was born in 1876, in Catalonia. His Catalan father was an
organist, music teacher and composer, his mother was Puerto Rican. As
a child he was a multi-instrumentalist, eventually settling on the
cello. By the time he was 12, Casals was already making his living
and financing cello lessons by playing the coffee houses of
Barcelona.
His chance discovery of Bach's Suites for Violoncello
Unaccompanied, inspired daily practice and a masterly
interpretation which helped to establish his reputation as a
maestro.
By the beginning of this century he had won worldwide fame as a
cellist and an inspired conductor. Despite his success he remained
humble: "First and foremost I am a human being; I am only secondarily
an artist."
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 Casals took up
residence in Prades in the French Pyrenees and began organising
relief for his countrymen interned in the south of France. After the
Allied victory in the Second World War, disgusted that the Allies had
not intervened to end the fascist dictatorship in Spain, he went into
exile again in Prades, refusing to give any more concerts. The great
German writer Thomas Mann hailed him as "a champion of the honour of
mankind."
With the bicentenary of the death of J.S. Bach in 1950 Casals agreed
to start making music with friends in Prades. This was the beginning
of the famous Prades music festival and then in 1956, he founded the
festival in Puerto Rico, birthplace of his mother and wife.
In 1958 Casals joined with his friend Albert Schweitzer appealing to
the super powers to stop militarisation and abandon atom bomb tests.
He dedicated his oratorio The Manger as his personal message
of peace "My contribution to world peace may be a modest one, but it
is my wish at least to have done what I was able to do for an ideal
that to me is holy."
Casal's ideal lives on in the festival he founded in his adopted
country. The current Director of the festival Krzystof Penderecki
spoke of "the temptation to nihilism" which has gained so much ground
this century and "the expansion of mass media and mass culture which
have weakened the individual and have deadened his sensitivity and
imagination without which there is no true creation."
The festival's programme is an attempt to reach out to the individual
and also to establish Puerto Rico as a cultural and artistic
destination. Televised by the Arts and Entertainment channel in
America this year's festival will have reached more than 60 million
households in the States, Canada and Latin America.
Among the highlights of this year's festival were Stanislaw
Skrowaczewski, one of the world's most sought after conductors,
conducting a concert version of Beethoven's Fidelio with a
cast of international singers and the world premiere of Carlos
Vasquez's Homage to Pablo Casals, a highly innovative solo
piece for cello.
The festival offers an opportunity not only to hear some of the best
classical musicians and music but a chance to slip away from San Juan
and sample some of the most unusual cuisine in the Caribbean, from
the ubiquitous 'mofongo' - mashed and roasted plantain balls to
excellent seafood and spit roasted pig, sold at roadside 'lecherosas'
on the way up into the mountains.
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