Bernardo Quesada
Biography
Bernardo Quesada is a Costa Rican singer-songwriter, arranger, producer and composer. He has been actively performing, recording and creating for the past 30 years. His work has earned him international praise and recognition from critics all over Latin and North America.
He is perhaps the only Costa Rican singer-songwriter who has achieved true and proven international recognition due to his musicianship, versatility and superb quality not only as a performer, but as a prolific producer, composer and arranger.
His name appears in multiple national and international productions such as: DecadaUno de Editus (along with Ruben Blades and León (Mexico), Migueli (Spain), Rubén Blades (Panama) Edgar Oceransky (Mexico), Adrian Gil (Mexico / Cuba) Andrés Correa (Colombia) Fran Fernandez (Spain) MacGregor (Mexico) and many more.
In the most recent years, Bernardo has been working on commissions by some of the most renowned and popular Latin American artists, who have trusted him with creating cross-over arrangements of their music to be translated into symphonic music. For example, Sonora Santanera (Mexico), Santiago Cruz (Colombia) and the Symphony Orchestra of the State of Mexico, are a few of the ensembles that have hired him to tackle the titanic effort of translating their popular repertoire into pieces of great symphonic depth and substance.
El Niño de Isabel
My piece is a story about the continuity of bloodline. It's a tribute to the memory that I have inherited from an 18th century Frenchman who, after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, arrived in the American continent and had a daughter with a native Guatemalan. This man and his daughter migrated to Costa Rica after losing his wife. In this Central-American country, the daughter met a man from Catalunya (northeastern Spain), who was fleeing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. From this union came Isabel, my father's mother, and it is to them that I dedicate this piece of music, which will reach the eyes and fingers of musicians who might not understand my native tongue, but they speak my language: music. 'We are light from the same spiral’