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Arcito Corazón
Lights! Cameras!! Music!!!
The genre of film making has always been a passion for me. I was fortunate enough to have a grandmother, Soledad Muñoz López, who introduced me to all Mexican things and took me to the Mexican Moviesat the Star Theater in Oakland, California. It was a time where access to the Mexican Cinema was restricted, so going to the movies was a really significant highlight of the week.
There I woud sit, a very young Lupe Elena, enthusiastic and ready for the movies and loving the palomitas! Movie going with "Tita" was always a high-point because of all the fascinating films we would see - not to mention all the wonderful music. How could I know then that when I saw the name "Manuel Esperón" at the end of many of the movies that one day I would have the pleasure of knowing him and his wife Beatriz?!
Don Manuel and Doña Beatriz were both extremely supportive in the development of AMORCITO CORAZÓN and had a very significant participation in this proyect which I was born to do! The concert is a work of love from the heart with one added twist! As renowned as Maestro Esperón is for his fabulous music in more than five hundred movies from the Época de Oro del Cine Mexicano, he never wrote the lyrics - only the music!
He was a pianist, conductor, composer, arranger - the complete musician. That being said, in realizing this project I thought "What if we took his music, songs with famous lyrics, and re-focused solely on the music which the Maestro wrote?" Accordingly, what Maestro Luis Zepeda and I have done is simply to follow the instrumental/classical context in the Maestro's music and to refocus these great songs as instrumental gems. My version is simply to highlight and to honor the talents and magic of Maestro Esperón's compositional style.
Leonard Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Andrew Lloyd Webber and other friends of mine were, likewise, also composers and not librettists and their music has also benefited form this 'refocusing' and been brought to an ever wider audience.
As we celebrate his centenary, is with heartfelt gratitude that I salute the memory of Maestro Manuel Esperón as well as his wife Beatriz, all the members of the Esperón family which includes my great friend the tenor Mauro Calderón!
ELENA DURÁN
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