Kazakh festival awards important prize to Cuban musician

HAVANA, Cuba, Jun 24 (ACN) The young Cuban musician and performer Annys Batista has just won First Prize at the prestigious Voice of Turan International Festival, held in the city of Turkistan, Republic of Kazakhstan.

The Cuban singer, a member of the Hermanos Saiz Association (AHS) and winner of several national and international awards, told exclusively the Cuban News Agency that she was exciting with the result, given the double challenge of being on stage in each performance and doing so in Kazakh.

This isn't the first time I've sung in another language unrelated to Spanish. In 2011, I had the opportunity to participate in the Slavianski Bazar International Arts Festival in Vitebsk, Belarus, she added.

One of the most special moments was a duet as part of the program, in which she had the pleasure of singing alongside one of the most popular performers on the local scene, Saken Maygaziyev, a song about love, entitled "Sin Edin" (It's You), she continued.

An instrumentalist and vocalist who graduated from the Manuel Muñoz Cedeño Vocational Art School in the eastern city of Bayamo, Batista has been part of several groups and collaborated on albums by Luna Manzanares, Ivette Cepeda, Toques del Rio, Luis Alberto Barberia, among others.

In 2021, she was awarded the Elena Burke Performance Scholarship by the AHS, which has also brought her multiple satisfactions in a musical career that is on the rise due to her unquestionable vocal qualities.

The most recent edition of Cubadisco, her debut at the Cuban disco festival, honored her with "Annys Batista Live Sessions," her debut work recorded in early 2024 under the production of Mayra Maria Garcia and awarded in the Medium-Length Audiovisual category.