![]() “Los Hermanos” is at its best in showing us the difficult logistics of life in Havana. The film skips back and forth, between New York and Havana, going on tour, filling in their history, charting each aspiring performer’s rise through competitions (Aldo studied in London for a bit) and noting, as many have before them, the economic disparity between lives in the US and those in Cuba. “Next thing I know, there’s some Russian in our apartment yelling at me,” Ilmar says with a laugh, remembering that first teacher in 1980s Havana. Ilmar jokes about how he was “tricked” into taking up the violin when his father returned from an Eastern European tour with a junior-sized violin. The sons of a famous (in Cuba) composer, they were “condemned to be musicians,” their father Guido says with a laugh. The film charts this collaboration, which climaxed with a North American concert tour, sometimes playing as a duet, often with Aldo joining the Harlem Quartet for compositions of his or his brother’s creation.īut what happened after Obama left the White House of course changed all that. It wasn’t until the Obama Administration started to thaw the relationship with Cuba that they could work together. He never moved back and eventually settled in New York and helped found The Harlem Quartet chamber music ensemble.Īldo, six years younger, took up the piano in a country whose development and economy have remained stagnant for decades But he became a star jazz composer and musician, a teacher married to successful orchestral conductor, Daiana, all thanks to family and government support for classically trained musicians.Īlthough they stayed in touch and managed to meet, with extreme difficulty, here and there. Ilmar, the older brother, took up the violin as a child, and in the last years of the Cold War, went to the Soviet Union with his mother so that he could further his classical music studies as a young teen. “Los Hermanos” is an engaging musical documentary about two Cuban brothers, star musicians, separated by the 62 year-old embargo the United States has imposed, to no positive effect, on the island nation.
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