The Boleros de Oro International Festival will take place from June 15 to 18 in Cuba. It will have the presence of prominent singers, composers, researchers, artists and specialists from the island and other countries, who will revere one of the most popular and legacy musical genres.
Under the auspices of the Association of Musicians of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), the event will remember the 140 years of the piece Sadness, the first bolero composed by José “Pepe” Sánchez from Santiago in 1883.
The centenaries will also be remembered, respectively, of the Vedette of America, Rosita Fornés (1923-2020) and the Dominican Alberto Beltrán (1923-1997) known as “El negrito del Batey”.
The Festival, created in 1987 and chaired by Dr.C. José Loyola Fernández, will pay tribute to the singers Elena Burke (1928-2002) and Pacho Alonso (1928-1982) on the 95th anniversary of their birth.
Likewise, it will evoke the life and work of the always beloved Pablo Milanés (1943-2022) who included numerous internationally known boleros in his discography.
Between June 15 and 16 in the Rubén Martínez Villena hall of UNEAC, the Boleros de Oro Colloquium will take place, chaired by Ms.C. Alicia Valdés Cantero, author of the Dictionary of notable women in Cuban music.
The program includes the inaugural conference “Lisandro Otero y el bolero de la Isla” by the poet, essayist and narrator Dr.C. Roberto Mendez Martinez. The Ms.C. Yosvel Hernández Alén will present the paper “Amaury Pérez Vidal, the essences of the bolero” and the musicologist José Reyes Fortún, a researcher at the National Museum of Music, will address the musical significance of Pablo Milanés.
The musicologist and consulting professor at the University of the Arts, Dr. C. María de los Ángeles Córdova de la Paz, will discuss the current bolero, while other specialists will present research results on figures such as Eusebio Delfín, Rosendo Ruiz Quevedo, Jorge Gonzalez Allue, Emma Elena Valdelamar, Ezequiel Rodríguez and the Galician contribution to Latin American musical taste, among other topics.
The bolero is a musical genre with birth registered more than a century ago in Santiago de Cuba and with a wide repercussion in Latin America and various countries. Endorsed by his legacy and permanence in time, he was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation since 2021.
Artists such as María Teresa Vera, Sindo Garay, Benny Moré and Olga Guillotknown as “La Reina del Bolero”, are some of the mythical bolero singers that Cuba has given to the world.
