Everywhere in the megapolis, the streets are littered with grimy children singing Christmas carols, their palms reaching out to beg for coins. Along Taft Ave. when your taxi stopped at an intersection for a red light, a couple of street urchins tapped at the cab window. You avoided looking at their faces. It is easier to avoid feeling a sense of guilt when poverty remains an abstraction and wears no face.
These kids had a gimmick. They launched into Joy to the World with a tiny tambourine and a tin drum. You turned around and caught sight of sunken cheeks and bony fingers before the green light flashed and the cab could speed away.
Dec. 13. Maestro Ruggero Barbieri and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra gave a concert – open to the public – courtesy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in cooperation with The Philippine American Life and General Insurance Company at the Philamlife Theater.
How odd that even though this was a free concert, the auditorium was much less than half-empty.
The opening number was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61, with Alfonso "Coke" Bolipata as soloist.
From this violin virtuoso, one could expect nothing less than the best. He delivered his part with graceful ease, meeting the challenges of the score with the touch of a master. Clarity and balance, passion and restraint informed his reading in the finest classical tradition. The cadenza of the Allegretto and the final one of the Rondo, he executed with joyful ease – the same sense of happiness that the composer must have felt in the company of his boyhood friend to whom he dedicated this concerto.
Memories of childhood are precisely the inspiration for the second number of the program, Gustav Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor.
Unlike the other symphonies of this composer, which draw melodic materials from folksong (and in fact most of them make use of singers), the Fifth is purely instrumental and does not have a literary level of meaning. The music, however, does carry echoes of Mahler’s childhood spent near a military camp.
The first two movements are orchestrated mainly for brasses and drums. In the opening trumpet call and the throbbing drums - even in the Funeral March – one immediately hears the martial character of the music with its suggestion of military bands. Agitation, turbulence, struggle and defiance are projected by the churning, heaving sounds of the orchestra, which Maestro Barbieri and the PPO deliver in full force.
The third movement, Scherzo, comes as a relief from the sturm und drang of the preceding movements. It swings to the triple meter of the Austrian Landler, the country dance, and the Viennese waltz. The horns and most specially the woodwinds are prominent to give this movement the rustic air and the civil elegance of Mahler’s homeland.
The centerpiece of this symphony is the Adagietto, a jewel of ineffable beauty scored for harp and strings, the bitter-sweet movement in ternary form floating as slowly as a cloud on a windless day creating a mood of serene contemplation tinged with a gentle melancholy.
The last movement is a rondo of enormous proportions in which themes from the preceding movements are recollected in a jovial mood, uniting the symphony into an organic whole and shaking the earth with cosmic laughter.
Two weeks before, Maestro Barbieri and the PPO had played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on the third and last day of the San Agustin International Music Festival. On that occasion, the work had sounded differently. The high vaulted ceiling and the vast enclosed space of the old Baroque church caused unearthly reverberations that imparted to the music an otherworldly ambiance. The first four movements specially the Adagietto, were delivered with greater care and precision but the Rondo sounded ill-rehearsed. At any rate, when the PPO can give a Mahler symphony of such a high order of performance, who would dare cavil?
Dec. 14. At the CCP Tanghalang Huseng Batute, Company Call presented Tony Perez’ Sa North Diversion Road.
The play makes you a voyeur peeping into a car speeding along the highway to San Fernando, Angeles, Tarlac, etc. and eavesdropping into the private lives of married couples in various states of estrangement, all played by John Arcilla and Flor Sacbibit. The tone ranges from low comedy to high melodrama, the dialogue from Pinoy gutter vernacular to bourgeois Pinoy English.
Company Call’s program note says it all: "The multiple personae of Man and Woman unfold in a series of vignettes to create a psychological tapestry woven with the timeless themes of love, life and death."
This maiden production has many things going for it: a new idealistic drama company with an "actor-driven" zeal to advance its cause; the prize-winning play of Perez; the direction and lighting design of multi-faceted Dennis Marasigan; the set and costume design of Ricardo Cruz; the involvement of Arcilla whose achievements as a stage and screen actor are not to be sneered at; and not least of all, the emergence of a genuine comic talent in Flor who can be expected to go far on the highway to stardom. With all these people behind the wheel, can Sa North Diversion Road get stalled at a dead-end or fall into a ravine?
Dec. 15. Just across the block at the PICC, Actor’s Actors Inc. mounted Patrick Marber’s comic drama, Closer.
Four characters, Alice (Ana Abad Santos-Bitong) a stripper in a London clip joint, Danny (Lee Robin Salazar), a novelist in the doldrums due to writer’s block, Anna (Pinky Amador), a listless photographic artist, and Larry (Bart Guingona), a dermatologist at large, form a psycho-erotic daisy-chain.
Closer is a fast-paced play with surprising twists and turns as the characters play the game of life and love with high stakes. In the course of the game, this sophisticated comedy for open-minded adults satirizes the mores of today’s generation including gay cruising on cyberspace.
Actor’s Actors Inc. which has exposed audiences to some of the most exciting plays of our time has again detonated a dynamite in its current TNT Season. When you consider the economic slump, poor marketing and the like, will this dynamite turn out to be a dud?
Dec. 17. Back at their home-ground, the CCP Main Theater, Maestro Barbieri and the PPO presented their Christmas concert along with guest artists soprano Josephine Roces-Chaves, bass baritone Jonathan Zaens, the U.P. Singing Ambassadors and The Mandaluyong Children’s Choir.
The first half of the concert was devoted to the music of Vienna – three waltzes by Johann Strauss, Jr. and a march by Johann Strauss, Sr.
What can lift the spirit than the lilting tunes of Roses from the South, Emperor Waltz and On the Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz except perhaps a glass of Austrian wine? The music was served by the PPO with sentiment but without sentimentality – that is, with tang but without schmaltz. And if you feel like swaying to the Viennese waltzes and marking time with your feet, just wait until Maestro Barbieri signals to you to clap your hands to the beat of the Radetzky March!
The second half of the program truly evoked the spirit of the season with a generous serving of Christmas treats.
Bass baritone Zaens boomed White Christmas and a jazzy Jingle Bells with his bedroom voice. Josephine charmed young and old withKumukutikutitap. Both singers were supported by the U.P. Singing Ambassadors. The orchestra delivered a soulful Pasko Na, Sinta Ko. The children from Mandaluyong sung three carols with angel-voices. Then followed a medley of Yuletide carols. including the ubiquitous Jingle Bells, which made your heart skip a beat because you recalled the homeless children caroling in the streets.
Maestro Barbieri and the PPO and their guest artists gifted their admiring audience with a generous encore – Handel’s Alleluia Chorus from The Messiah. Their combined musical forces rose to the heavens, so it seemed, but could they drown out the sounds of a tiny tambourine and a tin drum in your inner ear or tear out from your tearful inner eye the sorry sight of two grimy urchins with sunken cheeks and bony fingers?