The talented Cuban musician Paquito D'Rivera, a living legend of jazz, will give a concert this Monday, April 27, at the Symphony Hall of the National Auditorium in Madrid, at 7:30 PM, under the title "Jazz Meets the Classics".
"Hello, friends, I am Paquito D'Rivera, and if you’re in Madrid these days, this Monday, April 27th, we will be at the marvelous Auditorio Nacional de Madrid. At seven thirty, we will be enjoying a concert of 'Jazz meets the classics'... Don’t forget, you’re going to like it," said the Cuban musician in the video directed to his followers on CiberCuba.
The performance is part of the Horizons cycle of the Scherzo Foundation and will feature the Cuban pianist Pepe Rivero and the Colombian vibraphonist and marimbist Sebastián Laverde as members of the core trio.
As a special guest artist, the harmonica player from Madrid, Antonio Serrano, will participate. He is one of the leading international figures in chromatic harmonica, a Grammy Latino winner for his contribution to the tribute album "Entre 20 aguas: A la música de Paco de Lucía," and he also received the National Prize for Current Music in 2025.
The program will feature works by Mozart, Chopin, and other classical composers, blended with jazz. D'Rivera has noted that he interprets the slow movement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto as a "blues" and believes that Mozart was a great improviser who would have enjoyed this proposal.
The legendary clarinetist and saxophonist, who has achieved 18 Grammy and Latin Grammy awards in his over 75 years of artistic career, has been very active in the media in Spain over the past few weeks, combining the promotion of his European tour with strong political statements about Cuba.
In a recent interview with CiberCuba on April 15, D'Rivera called for a complete change of power on the island and was emphatic: "The same people who destroyed Cuba will not rebuild it."
Also in that interview, D'Rivera dedicated the song "Let's Go Now, It's Over!" to Díaz-Canel and described the denial of political prisoners in Cuba as a "great lie," where as of February 2026, there were 1,214 individuals imprisoned for political reasons, including 17 artists.
Additionally, in that conversation with CiberCuba, the musician criticized Chico Buarque for ignoring the situation of the rapper Maykel Osorbo, a Cuban political prisoner and winner of two Latin Grammys in 2021 for "Patria y Vida," who was sentenced to nine years in prison in June 2022.
D'Rivera, born in Havana in 1948, left Cuba in 1980 during a tour in Spain and has since been a steadfast critical voice against the dictatorship.
The concert this Monday at the National Auditorium presents a unique opportunity to hear live one of the greats of Cuban and Ibero-American jazz, in a program that promises to bridge two musical worlds that D'Rivera has been uniting for decades.
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