by the El Reportero’s news services
Lost and Found, the new album of the Cuban musical project Buena Vista Social Club, with unreleased songs recorded by its precursors, is ready, The Guardian newspaper stated today.
The group of veteran musicians and singers, founded in 1997 by Juan de Marcos Gonzalez and launched by British Ry Cooder, announced last year its dissolution in 2015, but it continues working.
The disc will not only include songs from the precursor times, but also a selection of tracks recorded live and in studio, during the early successes of the band.
Nick Gold, of the World Circuit record company, said he knew of certain unpublished gems by Buena Vista Social Club, but so many new projects emerged that they did not have time to delve into the past.
“When we finally had time, we were astonished for so many wonderful music it had,” said Gold, who stated that the launch of “Lost and Found” will be on March 24.
Bolaño: Good writer, bad literary critic, says Padura
Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura stated today that Chilean Roberto Bolaño was a great writer, but ‘’the worst literary critic of recent years’’.
For Padura, perhaps the more-read Cuban author in Latin America, Bolaño is the most important writer of his generation, although his anger with everybody permeated this judgment as a critic.
“He was a great lair, as the great writer he was: if he had read all the books he said he read, he would not have been able to write not even one of his own”, joked the National Prize for Literature-2012.
The creator of the character Mario Conde defined as “a Chilean fighting fish”, whose fight against past and contemporary authors made him issue drastic and sometimes misguided judgments.
Even so, Padura considered that the novels Los Detectives Salvajes (Savage Detectives) and the posthumous 2666 are enough to establish Bolaño (1953-2003) as one of the greatest authors in Latin American literature.
Padura and Bolaño as both considered important authors, with both a tendency for the police novels, a genre each of them reinvented in their own context and time.
Experts discover a Rembrandt painting retouched after his death
The baroque painting Susanna and the Elders, painted in 1647 by one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art, the Dutch Rembrandt, was widely retouched a century after the death of the artist, it was reported here today.
The German gallery Gemldegalerie of Berlin discovered that the English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds repainted two thirds of the picture in the second half of the eighteenth century, while preparing an exhibition.
“It was a fairly radical intervention. Actually, only the characters correspond to the version finished by Rembrandt’, said Bernd Lindemann, director of the Berlin museum.
Apparently Reynolds, who was the owner of the canvas, felt that the painting needed a comprehensive improvement, speculated Lindemann.
‘Susanna and the Elders’ can be seen until May 31 in the capital’s museum along with previous studies of Rembrandt and drawings of his students on the topic.
The Dutch artist (1606-1669) painted three versions of the piece that were reconstructed thanks to modern technology.
