Magdalena Delgado — Magdalena Delgado Vargas — is a Dominican choral conductor, singer and music educator. She works in a corner of Dominican music that rarely gets written about: the choir, where the conductor is the instrument and nobody records under their own name.

The first

In July 2014, at twenty-eight, she became the first Dominican to graduate with a master’s degree in choral conducting, taking the Master of Music with honours at Westminster Choir College — the conservatory in New Jersey that is among the few places in the world built specifically around choral singing.

The Dominican press covered it as the first of something, which it was. The country has choirs and has had them for a long time, but it had never sent anyone to that degree, and formal choral conducting had been something Dominican musicians learned by doing.

Singing before conducting

She sang with the Westminster Symphonic Choir, the ensemble that performs with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which put her under some of the most celebrated conductors working. Conductors who have sung in a first-rank choir tend to rehearse differently, because they have been on the other side of the baton.

She is a singer in her own right as well, billed as conductor and singer on concert programmes, and she has performed contemporary repertoire — among it Judith Shatin’s La Frontera.

Three countries

She has conducted and taught in the United States, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Since August 2019 she has been a choral conductor with Uniting Voices Chicago, the city’s children’s chorus, and she conducts its Hyde Park neighbourhood ensemble.

She also directs the children’s choir of the Green Lake Festival of Music in Wisconsin, and the American Choral Directors Association lists her among its clinicians in New Jersey — the professional standing that comes from other conductors asking you to teach them.