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Listening to Frank Fernandez's music is a wake-up call to our senses, a signal that we still live to enjoy and find delight in beauty. That certainty coupled with the recognition of this great Cuban pianist's values and virtues were the reasons behind this interview.

The name of Frank Fernandez kicks up our minds into a kind of association gear with an array of related sensations. Can you tell us about that moment when you discovered your inner self?

If you mean the moment when I discovered myself as an artist, indeed I have a mixture of personal memories and anecdotes my relatives used to recount about the time when I was 3 or 4 years old and I sat down in front of a piano at the Music Academy where my mother was the principal, and suddenly I started playing some pieces by ear that my mother's students were playing everyday. But both the human mystery and the discovery of artistic creation are still things to come into my life, things I suspect this earthly life is not long enough to break that enigma altogether.

Those who've had the privilege of keeping tabs on your musical career or just attending one of your master concerts love your virtuoso's abilities. What can you tell Caribbean Tourist Excellencies about your artistic career?

In my career, I think I've had the privilege of having received an atypical training based on four different underpinnings:

1.- The studies I made with Margot Rojas, the great teacher who was a Lambert's pupil and one of Frank Liszt's last students.

2.- The five-year training I got as a student with an excellent pianist and teacher named Victor Merzhanov at the Tchaikovski Conservatory in Moscow

3.- The knowledge, from my hometown in Mayari, of the very best traditional troubadour music and other genres of Cuba's popular music.

4.- The assimilation of the huge flow of Cuban piano traditions from the 19th and 20th centuries, with research studies and performances of Manuel Samuel and Ignacio Cervantes, the founding fathers of Cuban music, as well as Ernesto Lecuona, the paradigm of the blend between Spanish and African elements.

This training, I insist, has given me not only the acceptance of the public and the critics in 33 countries across Europe, Asia and America, but also the possibility -thanks to the wise advise of all my teachers- of being a diehard pupil who's got something new to learn every step of the way. I think that's the only chance an artist has to feel alive. The moment you start seeing yourself as a professional who's got nothing new to learn, then that's the moment when the creator inside of you starts to die.

We know that all great pianists like you should resort to a very strict discipline. What can you say about it taking account of your own experience?

I believe that being an artist, no matter how great or famous you might be, can only be possible by means of sacrifice at any rate, a little bit of talent and bulletproof daily discipline.

Do you play classical and popular music in the same mastery breath? What's the secret about it? Can you talk in this case about a similar preference level?

I guess there's no secret whatsoever. I got acquainted with classical music as a child in my home since my mother was a piano teacher and principal of the Music Academy in Mayari. Also in Martin Malendez's house, the director of my hometown's municipal band where I also met the best popular artists of that time who used to visit the place to show their respect to that family of superb and intuitive musicians. Even four of five of their children also received an academic training and poured the very best of their creative energies into the best genres of Cuba's popular music. As far as preferences as concerned, everybody knows around 90 percent of my career has been developed in the realm of universal classical and Cuban music, yet I feel as much pleasure playing the five Beethoven concerts as playing a bolero, or just when I accompany a good song written by any of my good friends and top performers of this particular genre.

What do you think the greatest moments of your career have ever been?

In the 44 years of my career, there've been great and unforgettable moments in my life that come to my mind effortlessly: - My debut with Cuba's National Symphonic Orchestra at the age of 19. - My presentation at the Shauspielhaus Hall in Berlin and the emotional silence of the German public when I finished playing Schumann's Fantasy, followed by a prolonged standing ovation that forced me to come back onstage nine times to take a bow. - The fact that I was picked to play Thaikovski's First Concert at the Smatena Hall in Prague with that city's Symphonic Orchestra 100 years after the day when composer Piotr Ilich led the orchestra in that same auditorium. - The possibility of playing and performing alongside my invitees at the Gala for the 100th anniversary of great Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona before a sold-out audience at the National Theater in Havana, with people even packing the corridors and stairs just to pay tribute to our music. - When I played solo for the first time ever next to the National Symphonic Orchestra with the five Beethoven concerts for two nights in a row, egged on by the enthusiasm of the audience because plenty of people couldn't sit in the hall and stayed outside the venue claiming for a second performance. - The fact that my concert in Tokyo was chosen the best in 1992. Let's not forget that the Japanese capital presents 17 different musical shows every night. - When I was awarded as Doctor of Honor in Arts - Every time any of my students has won any of their 27 international awards combined, an many other moments that would be impossible to remember right now. Every time I play onstage or compose a new piece, I truly give the very best of myself as if it were the last thing I'm ever going to do in my lifetime.

Besides being a superb performer, to what an extent can we talk about Frank Fernandez as an arranger and composer?

I'd rather have a great Cuban writer and essayist like Guillermo Rodriguez Rivera to broach that subject:

“... with his integrating capacity, he manages to blend different sound worlds that find out and complement one another thanks to his talent. Out of that mixture, a magical music universe is born, a realm where, for the proud sake of Cuban music, the unmistakable art of maestro Frank Fernandez lords its way."

Any influences? I think I've got all the influences of the good music you listen to in this world, and sometimes I guess I can remember things from past lives.

The excellence of your presentations is capable of conveying us to a different dimension, as if we were walking on air. I believe a part of that sensation is owed to your body language. What's the root of that expressive strength you've always been marked by?

The are two kinds of gestures; forethought gestures as elements of the performing arts used to impress the audience when you can't play with your hands the music the composer is demanding. And there are the gestures that sprout up out of muscular contradictions generated by well-played and moving music. Once again I ask your permission to allow the great Dominican pianist, critic and writer Aida Bonelly, a graduate from the Julliard School in New York City, to be the one that speaks out about the root of what some people call the power of communication.

"What's the magic of the unanimous response of the mixed audience that stands up and applauds hilariously? It can be said that some respond to an instinctive emotion. The most experienced ones jump to a knee-jerk trigger before thinking twice. Their emotional fibers have been touched by the intensity of the blaring sounds now fading away. A contagious wave agitates the jubilant audience. This plural manifestation of sudden enthusiasm occurs every time Frank Fernandez makes one of his extraordinary performances of peerless piano."

What ingredients make it peerless? Does it have anything to do with the self-confidence you play?

No, because other pianists are also self-confident performers and they don't stir up so much enthusiasm.

Is it maybe the huge amplitude of the dynamic arch you run from your fortissimos to your pianissimos?

You bet that helps, but he discovers swift contrasts that no other performer can churn out. Frank Fernandez is all sound quality and an array of melodic lines that usually passes by unnoticed in other performing versions. That's his contribution to the interest in musical form. He disregards ornamentation because he manages to go to the pith of the matter as a whole. He enriches texture by highlighting the volume of apparently non-functional melodic cores. In Sonata Aurora he reveals findings that Beethoven himself would have unearthed in his time.

Something about the magic of Frank Fernandez's playing style lies in his phrasing resiliency and urging fluency. He catches his breath between phrases as he breaks the humdrum style other performers dear so much. He turns to dynamic resources, pitch alterations of extreme clarification that only a few musicians can pull off. In a word, Frank Fernandez is a genial performer.

Frank Fernandez should be penciled in as one of the top-five pianist of the moment, the piano man that leads the pack of his peers because he can play the entire repertoire in his own style, enhanced through the discovery of secrets nobody but him can disclose.

And for the encore he dedicated to me, I've got this final comment to make. Frank Fernandez raises technical difficulty levels to a new benchmark that will be left as homework for the handful of concert pianists who could someday be up to par with him, if ever. I'm talking about the glissandi at simultaneous intervals of second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth, just because the black keyboards and the octaves were, well, a cakewalk for Frank Fernandez Loor, the genial pianist who has grown out of his breeches –in the good sense of the expression- thanks to hard work, dedication and unbeatable passion.

As to your most important presentations, concerts, recognitions and awards, what can you tells us?

I've never worked to win awards or get recognitions, even when they cannot be compared to the joyfulness I feel when the audience listens to my music and applauds me. Every time I'm rewarded for my work, I appreciate it very much and that makes me feel very happy.

To wrap things up, I give the floor to famed Cuban musician Harold Gramatges:

“The climax of the program went to the hands of pianist Frank Fernandez. The story goes that when Rachmaninov took that piece of Paganini –the greatest violin virtuoso of his time- made up of four sounds to develop the variations that form the Rhapsody, he thought no one else but him –that fabulous pianist of his time, too- could do that piece. The piano acrobatics of the Rhapsody over a piece composed by Paganini leads performers to subvert the means over the end. But this technically genial composition , beyond the inner fibers of its bedrock, embraces a spring of poetic content as if a garden of beautiful flowers would be blooming inside a heavy jungle. With his vast musical knowledge, his profound sensitivity and virtuoso's skills, maestro Frank Fernandez took us to that hidden garden as if in an act of artistic magic and revelation. Thank you, maestro!” - Harold Gramatges, Tomas Luis de Victoria Award, Cuba

I believe that being an artist, no matter how great or famous you might be, can only be possible by means of sacrifice at any rate, a little bit of talent and bulletproof daily discipline.

I've never worked to win awards or get recognitions, even when they cannot be compared to the joyfulness I feel when the audience listens to my music and applauds me. Every time I'm rewarded for my work, I appreciate it very much and that makes me feel very happy.