Jorge Maronna: "In today's Argentina, Les Luthiers would have been impossible"

Farewell.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
03 June 2023 Saturday 23:00
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Jorge Maronna: "In today's Argentina, Les Luthiers would have been impossible"

Farewell. Long, but final. Les Luthiers will conclude their long career, 56 years on stage, before the end of the year. They say goodbye to their audience. And it is the turn of Spain. As of today, the Argentine humorous and musical group is set up with a new show, Más tropiezos de Mastropiero , at the CaixaBank Príncipe Pío theater in Madrid, followed by Seville, Barcelona and Sant Feliu de Guíxols, the last place on their Spanish tour in the Porta Ferrada Festival on July 9.

Jorge Maronna (1948), the last of its four original founders who is still alive after the disappearance of Marcos Mundstock in 2020, says that they are "56 years of work and this work is beautiful but also very demanding, and we prefer to make one last effort now that we are fine, healthy, and we can have a beautiful farewell.”

He thought, he confesses, that the group could continue without him Carlos López Puccio –52 years in the formation– along with the additions of recent years, but finally they have decided to close in style with new stories by Johann Sebastian Mastropiero, his satire of classical composers, who are interviewed in the show and tell "his story, his reasons, his works are presented and near the end there is a big surprise". Of course, there is no shortage of new compositions or impossible instruments: “One of them is the organ with pistons, with the appearance of a huge car engine, somewhat futuristic; the other is a kind of bass made over a basin,” smiles Maronna.

And he assures that Les Luthiers “is basically humor, which is expressed through linguistic games, music, parodies, instruments”. A group that, he remembers, met in Argentina in the sixties, in the engineering choir. “I think that today Les Luthiers could not be born in Argentina, it is another time, another country. When the group was born in Buenos Aires, the country was better off, there was not so much poverty and there was greater care for culture than today. I do not remember, except for the dictatorships, which were the horror for other reasons, the worst moment in Argentina in a democracy ”, he concludes.