Guarionex Aquino Reyes was a Dominican lyric baritone, radio producer and singing teacher. He was one of the leading concert voices of the country in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and he later devoted himself to broadcasting and to teaching. The percussionist of the same name is his son.

Mao

He was born in Mao, in the province of Valverde, in 1924. He took his first music lessons very young from the Spanish teacher Rafael Emilio Arté, and while still a boy moved to Santiago de los Caballeros, where he began appearing on the radio stations of the city and at the Café Yaque.

The voice

The musicographer Arístides Incháustegui, who was himself a tenor and sang some of the same repertoire, described the instrument in detail: a lyric baritone, round and intense, of great volume, reaching comfortably above the natural A, with a velvety timbre, careful diction and broad phrasing. He considered Aquino one of the most finished products of the La Voz Dominicana school.

Concert and opera

He built his reputation in the concert repertoire during the fifties, appearing in opera evenings in the capital with the national symphony and taking the baritone solo in sacred works. He also performed abroad during those years.

Estampas de mi Tierra

Between 1964 and 1965 he produced a programme on the state broadcaster for which he gathered a large body of songs dedicated to the provinces of the country and recorded them as singles. That project is the core of his recorded legacy, and it is why so much of his repertoire carries the name of a Dominican town.

Several of those pieces were written or arranged by Julio Alberto Hernández. Among them are Amor Profundo, built on a décima by the poet Juan Antonio Alix, and Mañanitas de San Juan, a setting of a poem by Amada Nivar de Pittaluga arranged as a guarapo.

Radio and teaching

He founded a cultural radio station in his home town of Mao, dedicated to Dominican music and traditions, and worked for years as a singing teacher, first at the academy of La Voz Dominicana and later at the audiovisual training centre of the state television, where he returned to teach at the end of the nineties.

The archive

The Archivo General de la Nación later issued a set of four compact discs of his recordings with an accompanying booklet, which is how the bulk of his work survives in accessible form. He died in Santo Domingo in December 2010, at eighty-six.