Maki's playground
January 7, 2013 Leave a comment
Antonio Molina
Antonio Molina de Hoces was born in Malaga on March 9 1928. He was a singer of Copla and Flamenco with a singular, falsetto voice and wonderful natural technique that led him to star in several shows and films.
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November 9, 2012 Leave a comment
María Antonia Abad Fernández, whose stage name is Sara Montiel was born in Campo de Criptana in La Mancha in March 1928. Her parents were subsistence farmers scratching out a living in the land of Don Quijote.
From a very early age Sara stood out for her beauty and talent, both of which impressed Vicente Casanova, an influential producer and the owner of CIFESA film studios who saw her singing a saeta (an a capella religious song) during a Holy Week procession in Orihuela and arranged for her to have singing and elocution classes.
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October 13, 2012 Leave a comment
There were a number of double acts that shone during the heyday of Copla Española. Pepe Blanco and Carmen Morell were one. Here we take a look at their individual careers and their work together.
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September 22, 2012 Leave a comment
Juana Reina Castrillo, whose stage name was Juanita Reina, was born in Seville on 25 August 1925. She was known as The Queen of Copla.
She was born and grew up in the barrio of La Macarena and studied dance at Enrique El Cojo’s Academy. Her grandfather paid for her classes thanks above all to the insistence of a producer of Zarzuelas that were performed at the Teatro Cervantes in the city.
She was the eldest of Miguel Reina Mijez and Dolores Castrillo Pascual’s nine children, and although at first her father was reluctant for her to become an artist, with the help of a loan of 125,000 pesetas from a cousin, he staged her first show: Los Churumbeles.
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July 22, 2012 4 Comments
María Dolores Flores Ruiz, better known by her stage name of Lola Flores, was born in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) on 23rd January 1923. She was a singer of Copla and Flamenco, a bailaora and actress and was known as “La Faraona” (The Pharaoh Queen, more or less).
Over the decades her personality, character and performing style were described variously as racial, temperamental, authentic or genius.
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July 8, 2012 1 Comment
Trinidad Olga Ramos Sanguino was born in Badajoz on 18 July 1918.
When she was only eight her family moved to Madrid, where she studied violin and singing at the Conservatory where, in 1943, she was to win the Chamber Music award.
In the forties she was part of the Orquesta Fémina, performing in several music cafés in the capital such as El Café Universal.
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June 8, 2012 6 Comments
Magdalena Nile del Río, whose stage name was Imperio Argentina was born in December 1910 in the Barrio de San Telmo in Buenos Aires. Her father was Antonio Nile, a guitarist from Gibraltar and her mother the Spanish dancer Rosario del Río. She sang and danced from an early age and made her début at 14 at the Teatro Romea in Madrid. The playwright Jacinto Benavente, who was a connoisseur of the genre, was smitten and commented on how much she reminded him of two of the great Divas of the time – Pastora Imperio and La Argentinita – and thus her stage name came into being.
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June 2, 2012 Leave a comment
Miguel Frías de Molina was born in Málaga on 10th April, 1908. He was raised by six women: his mother, his sister and four aunts and as a child attended a church school.
As a teenager he moved to Algeciras and took up his first job as a cleaner in a brothel. It was here, when one of the prostitutes tried to seduce him, that he understood and accepted his homosexuality. Something that, sadly and scandalously, was to cost him dearly in later life.
At the age of twenty he worked as tour guide, accompanying groups of tourists to shows at the Tablaos in the region. But he knew he had a special talent: a voice and artistic temperament perfectly suited to Copla Española. He became a mainstay of the genre and was its first truly great male voice.
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May 15, 2012 2 Comments
Estrella Castro Navarrete was a singer and actress known by her stage name of Estrellita Castro. She was born in Seville on 28th June 1908 in Calle Mateos Gago, the street that leads from the Giralda to the Barrio de Santa Cruz, one of the areas of the city with strongest traditional character.
Estrellita was the youngest of eleven children. Her father was a fishmonger from Galicia. From the age of eleven she attended the Maestro Realito’s dance academy, doing the housework to help pay for her classes. At the age of twelve she danced for the first time in the presence of King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia. A key figure at the beginning of her career was the legendary bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who saw her dance at a Gala for underprivileged children and gave her a gold coin. She made her début at “Tronío” in the Calle Sierpes and went on to perform at all the major theatres in Spain, Europe, Latin America and even the United States.
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May 5, 2012 4 Comments
LA COPLA ESPAÑOLA
La Copla has evolved as a uniquely Spanish artistic expression, through song, of popular sentiment: sentiment narrated in lyrics that tell stories set to the music of guitars, palillos, pianos or trumpets.
The genre derives from popular verse, from the rhapsodies and songs of medieval minstrels, or those singing in later times in the corrales, finally finding expression in the voices of the great divos and divas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Copla was born of this fusion between the picaresque Tonadilla and Cuplé, with the added influence, through Flamenco, of an Andalusian and Gypsy spirit, that harks back to its Moorish roots and is a vibrant reflection of diversity of the cultural melting pot that Andalusia has always been: from the olive groves of Jaen to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Cadiz, Huelva and Málaga, the potters workshops on the banks of the Guadalquivir in Seville or the mines of Sierra Morena, the rich taste of Andalusia pervades the genre.
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