Ernesto Lecuona

Ernesto Lecuona (Casado)
(b Guanabacoa, 7 Aug 1896; d S Cruz de Tenerife, 29 Nov 1963). Cuban composer.

Born into a musical family, he played the piano from an early age and wrote his first song when he was 11. He studied the piano with Carlo Alfredo Peyrellade, Saavedra and Hubert de Blanck. He graduated from the National Conservatory in Havana in 1913, receiving first prize and a gold medal, and soon made his first appearance as a composer–pianist. Then, after further studies with Joaquín Nin, he made several tours of Latin America, Europe and the USA as the leader of a dance band, Lecuona’s Cuban Boys, which became quite well known. For some years he lived in New York, where he wrote for musicals, films and the radio. In his concerts he usually performed his songs and dances for piano, as well as light pieces by other late 19th- and early 20th-century Cuban composers. His salon piano pieces, using ‘white’ peasant and Afro-Cuban rhythms, found wide favour, and many of his songs, too, achieved great popularity. Indications have surfaced that in later years he wrote in a more formal style, with greater use of development and classical forms, and a more elaborate structure. A piano trio performed only once in Havana and fragments of a string quartet point to a more modern, almost Stravinskian harmony.