For 53 years, Aurelio de la Vega has been among the top Cuban composers outside his native Cuba - but dead to the communist regime.
Composer Aurelio de la Vega
Blacklisted by Fidel Castro and company, he was delisted by the music conservatory he founded and considered persona non grata by the press and orchestras of Cuba.
Then last week, without warning, the Northridge maestro vaulted from the dungeon into the pantheon.
"Aurelio de la Vega ... is considered one of the two most important living Cuban musicians of so-called cultured or classical music," declared Cubanow.net, which some say is a digital organ of the Cuban government, in a story and interview published Oct. 9.
De la Vega was, it added, "an illustrious Cuban."
In the U.S., the 86-year-old composer, pianist and professor emeritus of music at Cal State Northridge had just been nominated for a Latin Grammy, his second such honor in four years.
The award-winning musician also had 70 works for symphonic orchestras and chamber groups on his resume, including pioneer forays into electronic music - none performed in Castro's Cuba.
And while his beloved Cuba was years behind him, it has been an essential part of his creative DNA.
"I was a persona non grata for 50 years - because I left Cuba, because I didn't agree with their politics," de la Vega said. "In a totalitarian state, that's what happens. Nobody would mention my name. I didn't exist."  More >>
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Leyenda del Ariel Criollo (Legend of the Creole Ariel), for cello and piano, was written at my home in Miramar, La Habana, in 1953, specifically created for my dear friends, the first cellist of the Havana Philharmonic Adolfo Odnoposoff and his wife, the pianist Bertha Huberman. The work is my most overtly Cuban composition. Without quoting any thematic folkloric or popular Cuban melody, Leyenda del Ariel Criollo transforms various Cuban melo-rhythms creating a harmonic palette at times post-Impressionistic and at times pan-tonal. The work was premiered by Odnoposoff and Huberman in Havana in 1954, at a concert of the Sociedad de Conciertos, and immediately recorded by PANART for an LP which included works by various other Cuban composers, such as Amadeo Roldán, Pedro Menéndez and José Ardévol. It was played the world over by the two commissioning, above mentioned instrumentalists, on several of their yearly traveling sojourns, and remains one of my most played compositions.