Zanaida Robles
Celebrated African-American conductor, composer, and singer Zanaida Robles held a full-length concert at All Saints Church in Pasadena on Thursday, July 24.
The concert involved works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for chamber choir, solo piano, solo organ, and piano and violin as well as a sacred choral piece by Zanaida.
After the concert, I had the chance to interview Zanaida.
Tell me a little about yourself as a musician?
I have a multi-faceted career. I sing with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, including performances at Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, and I am on the music staff at All Saints. As a conductor, I am the Artistic Director of the San Gabriel Valley Choral Company, and this fall I am going to be teaching choir at Glendale Community College.
You’re wonderfully in demand! Tell me about the Coleridge-Taylor project.
For my dissertation, I am analyzing the choral music of an Afro-British composer named Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He was active at the turn of the 20th Century, at which time he was a great inspiration to the African-American community for having a high level of acceptance in Classical music, a field where people of African descent were not well represented or appreciated. He’s most known for Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which is an epic choral and orchestral cantata on the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At one time, this work was more popular than Handel’s Messiah, but it fell into obscurity after Coleridge-Taylor’s death. My aim is to resurrect interest in this composer by reintroducing his works into the repertoire of current ensembles.
That brings me to tonight’s concert, which was wonderful. If I had to pick one word to describe the music that I heard, it would be sumptuous. Tell me more about tonight.
Tonight is a culmination of research and bringing together fantastic musicians from the area to put this music back into the world. And, it was a thrill to perform and to hear works that haven’t been performed or celebrated for over one hundred years.
What an accomplishment! Congratulations, and thank you for introducing us to this beautiful music. A number of your collaborators told me how much it meant to them as well.
I was very grateful to have the opportunity to collaborate with such wonderful musicians and singers who came from across SoCal. And finally, it was wonderful to do this at All Saints in Pasadena, which represents a sort of epicenter of my community in the San Gabriel Valley. I had the chance to make an offering of artistic value to this community that’s given me so much.
We look forward to hearing more from this musical dynamo who is truly homegrown, having grown up in Monrovia and attended LA County High School for the Arts, CalState Northridge, CalState-Long Beach, and USC.
To learn more about Zanaida, visit her website.
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