Siboney

Ernesto Lecuona's postcard from a Cuba of the imagination. Written in the late 1920s by the island's great concert composer, 'Siboney' carries the sweep of...

Ernesto Lecuona's postcard from a Cuba of the imagination. Written in the late 1920s by the island's great concert composer, 'Siboney' carries the sweep of the zarzuela stage over a son's pulse — a song that longs for home in the voice of someone far from it. Rita Montaner gives it its early Cuban reading; Xavier Cugat then folds it into the American rhumba craze, and it keeps climbing — Bing Crosby in Hollywood, Connie Francis onto the US pop charts in a lush bilingual version. Seventy years on, Omara Portuondo slows it to a bolero ache with the Buena Vista Social Club. A parlor song that became a standard of two hemispheres.

Composer

Ernesto Lecuona

Year

1927

Lineage

zarzuela/son