Festival Mar Abierto 2024 presents international star Omara Portuondo on a unique and unrepeatable world tour, “The Farewell Tour,” where, along with the Orquesta Failde, she pays tribute to the legendary Buena Vista Social Club. She will perform on September 22, 2024, at the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
Omara Portuondo: At 93 years old, the Cuban icon won the 2023 LATIN GRAMMY AWARDS for her album VIDA released in May 2023. The album is nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY AWARDS.
Omara Portuondo is one of Cuba’s greatest vocalists and has been very popular since the day she began singing professionally in the late 1940s. From 1950 to the late 1960s, she was Cuba’s leading interpreter of filin-style songs (the word comes from the English word ‘feeling’ and describes music inspired by the performances of Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, and Glenn Miller, among others). At the height of her popularity, Portuondo sang with various groups, always with great success.
She began her professional career at Havana’s Tropicana Cabaret in 1930, and in the 1950s she launched her international career backing Nat King Cole. In 1997, at age 67, Omara became La Diva de Buena Vista Social Club, crowning her fame after half a century of an enormous national and international solo career. Omara won her first Latin Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Tropical Album along with a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. She received three Grammy Award nominations in 2019; in 2021, Omara was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts by the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Spain, in a ceremony presided over by the King and Queen of Spain. She later won the prestigious Songlines Pioneer Award for her lifetime contribution to Cuban music and culture.
Omara Portuondo Peláez was born in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana in 1930. Omara’s mother came from a wealthy Spanish family and was expected to marry into another socialite family. Instead, she eloped with the man she loved, a tall, handsome baseball player on the Cuban national team. He was also black, and at that time mixed-race marriages were still frowned upon in Cuba. “My mother always hid the fact that she had married a black man. If they ran into each other on the street, they had to ignore each other. But at home they recreated what society denied them: a haven of peace and harmony. They loved each other very much,” Omara recalls.
Description translated by Ivette Romero. For more information, see https://auditorioalfredokraus.es/evento/omara-portuondo-festival-mar-abierto-2024/2320
Also see https://www.festivalmarabierto.com/
Festival Mar Abierto 2024 presents international star Omara Portuondo on a unique and unrepeatable world tour, “The Farewell Tour,” where, along with the Orquesta Failde, she pays tribute to the legendary Buena Vista Social Club. She will perform on September 22, 2024, at the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Omara Portuondo:
