Sitting in the lobby of the Pernik Hotel, composed, and with his eyes attentive to every movement around Ivan Perez, National Prize of Cuban Radio, received me with a smile of those he keeps as a musicalizer and actor of Radio Progreso.
The great artist who does not live to boast is, simply, a professional of high aesthetic flight. In a dialogue for Radio Angulo digital he told us about his professional life.
Maestro, do you believe in the future of Cuban Radio?
“I see it very well. Radio has always been renewed. In Radio Progreso, the station where I work, it was not the same in the 30s or 40s of the last 20th century. And in the 50’s they were live dramatizations. And what happened when the tape came? It was a breakthrough.
As for digitization and online radio, what do you think?
“Nowadays digitization is a great thing. On tape it was cumbersome, but now you cut and separate. When you write and you make a mistake you don’t have to throw away or tear up papers. The world has always been a constant movement and renewal. And Radio is also a renewal”.
Iván, how did you live the stages of transformations of the radio?
“I am not the same as I was 20 years ago. I’ve had to temper myself. And when the cartridges arrived, it was another step forward. I was also the musicalizer of those plates that were breaking”.
“I have been a musicalizer of constant transitions. And as an actor, sometimes, I have to play a seven-year-old child or a 77-year-old grandfather, because my voice allows me to do it. It’s been 66 years dedicated to radio”.
You have developed a multifaceted career, what is radio in your life?
“The Radio is something wonderful. I have been part of films, like the one inspired on singer Benny Moré, I have had a theater group at Juanelo neigborhood in the courtyard of my house, but on the radio in one day you can do four or seven characters. And yes, that can be done by a person with a lot of talent and professionalism.”
Is musicalization your masterpiece?
For me, musicalization is the most complex profession in radio production, because you make the program from the very presentation”.
To what extent does the culture and knowledge of a sound director influence a radio work?
“One has to know about the history of music, because if I’m going to do an Agatha Christie story, in London in 1850, I have to know about the composers of that period”.
What is musicalization for you?
“It’s a very beautiful profession, but you are a great manipulator, when you put a chord and you want someone to jump.”
Talking with maestro Iván Pérez is a gift of life and profession, from a living academy of the art of radio creation.
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