Featured artists:
Lisette Oropesa
This album is introduced by the Cuban zarzuela, María la O (1930) by Ernesto Lecuona. Cuba, with more than 2500 zarzuelas composed, is the second great homeland of the genre, and Ernesto Lecuona and Gonzalo Roig are two true pillars of Cuban zarzuela. It also has a more dramatic profile, bringing to the stage the harsh social problems of slavery, racism, etc. The album concludes with the Catalan-born composer Gonzalo Roig (1890-1970) with the mythical Cecilia Valdés, which the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz defined as the zarzuela of "Cubanness, full, heartfelt, conscious and desired". Cecilia Valdés is a zarzuela with a strong racial content, with slavery as one of its central themes. Roig reaffirms in it the symbiosis of black music, Creole peasant music and Spanish music.