“I feel prefer it’s time to personally leave a so long! to my followers in probably the most distant countries, to which, since teleportation has not yet been invented, it seems tougher for me to return,” the artist said within the press release sent by her office.
Omara Portuondo: “The Woman I Am”
Hers won’t be an absolute and immediate retirement, but it should be from international commitments. “For me, singing is to live, it’s my way of being. For those who ask me about my favorite place, it should all the time be the stage, the song I sing, the following applause. So long as I even have a voice and someone wants to listen to me, let me sing,” she said.
Portuondo, who turned 90 within the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, a round anniversary for which she had precisely launched into one other “tour” when the pandemic was declared, justifies the title of this next tour after “a lot sad news, so many goodbyes, a lot distance, which have made us higher understand the worth of life, family and friends.”
The diva of the Buena Vista Social Club, who anticipates that perhaps after this last tour outside of Cuba “she’s going to need to spend more time within the studios,” has just opened the contracting of live shows, for which no date has been advanced in the mean time.
In July 2021, Portuondo performed on the Teatre Grec of Barcelona, as a part of her ninetieth birthday live shows.
Portuondo (Havana, 1930) is one in all the good exponents of traditional music in Cuba, where she can be revered because the “bride of the filin,” a genre of Cuban song that’s characterised by its moving lyrics and that was born within the Nineteen Forties.
Her long profession began in 1945 as a dancer within the famous Havana Tropicana Cabaret, but it surely was in song that she found her space based on the golden age of traditional music in her country, where she soon shared the stage with César Portillo de la Luz and José Anthony Mendez.
As a member of the D’Aida Quartet together with Elena Burke, Moraima Secada and her sister Haydée, she accompanied stars comparable to Édith Piaf, Pedro Vargas, Rita Montaner, Bola de Nieve, Benny Moré and Nat King Cole.
It’s from the Nineteen Seventies when her name is consolidated with its own weight by singing with the Aragón Orchestra and recording albums comparable to the acclaimed Palabras and Desafíos with the Spanish label Nubenegra.
At over 70, she reinforced her position as a world star with the Buena Vista Social Club success, together with which she traveled world wide to the applause from the general public and critics. In 2009 she won a Latin Grammy within the tropical music category for her album Gracias, for which she was also nominated for a Grammy for Best Latin Tropical Music Album.
She also received the National Music Award, probably the most prestigious of its kind in Cuba, and in 2019 she won the Latin Grammy Award for Musical Excellence, amongst many other awards.
EFE/OnCuba
