Thank you so much to Platea Magazine for talking with me about my upcoming Zarzuela concert in Madrid and Seville!
Where does your love for zarzuela come from?
Directly from my grandparents, first of all, because they were great lovers of the genre. In Cuba there is a zarzuela theater that is very popular and when my grandparents lived there, they went frequently. They also had a record collection at home. Also, my mother, who was a singer and still sings beautifully, was always singing her zarzuelas, handwritten scores. The penalty of zarzuela is that there is not much music in print, commercialized, with critical editions that can be studied and shared. It's a shame, because I think it's one of the main reasons why this beautiful music is hardly sung outside of Spain, not even in America. But at the same time it is beautiful to see how our grandparents, our parents, wrote it by hand to be able to sing it.
