Beethoven and Perez Prado... a mix...

One hundred and forty years after the premiere of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, at the house door of Cuban pianist and composer Dámaso Pérez Prado knocked not fate but the muse who inspired him to compose his Mambo No. 5.

Pérez Prado, a composer of mambos and danzones
In 1948, the thirty-two-year-old Cuban arranger was at the peak of his fame and had already composed such a number of mambos and danzones that, tired of inventing titles (Patricia, for example) had decided, "four mambos ago", identify them with just a number, from thereon. For this reason, the 78-rpm disc that went on sale the following year had on one side a piece titled with its latest witticism, Qué rico el mambo, and on the other – with the same number as the Fifth – the popular Mambo No. 5.

Dámaso Pérez-Prado
(1916 - 1989)

Akira Miyagawa, popularizer of "serious music"
Cubans and people from all the world danced for twenty years to the rhythm of that mambo and others, either with opus number as without it, until the enthusiasm for the mambo began to wane to give way to other rhythms, such as salsa, for example. in the late seventies. Precisely around those years, the future Japanese director and pianist Akira Miyagawa, also an arranger, was taking his first steps on the other side of the globe. With the aim of divulging classical music, he began to devise impressive arrangements of classical pieces, making them friendly to those who do not show a natural disposition towards "serious music".

Akira Miyagawa (1961 - )

An unexpected mix
Recently, together with an orchestra of very young musicians, Akira decided to borrow from Beethoven and Pérez Prado some bars of their respective masterpieces to "compose" a surprising hybrid.

The result of this unique undertaking is shown in a video in which Akira invites us to walk without a break from the ominous opening motif of four notes of the Fifth Symphony allegro ("the fate that knocks at your door") to the joy and enjoyment of life that Caribbean music (more precisely, Cuban music) represents: the hundred time mentioned – in movies and television – Mambo N ° 5.

To all this, we have hardly named Beethoven. I don't know how he would have reacted. I want to believe he had smiled, despite how grumpy and irritable he was in his later years.