Venezuela’s pride: El Cuarteto, Dalila

El Cuarteto and singer-actress Dalila Colombo, both widely acclaimed and admired in Latin America, elevated popular entertainment to unique heights when they introduced Venezuelan music and instruments to listeners at the CCP Little Theatre while alternately enchanting, enthralling and fascinating them.

Tall, svelte and beautiful Dalila was a stunning presence. Having been a stage and film actress, she infused drama into every toss or turn of her head and facial expression, thus conveying, by turns, arrogance, pride, defiance, charm, flirtatiousness or passion. With her deep, dark, heavy voice – she has sung in opera – she readily gave the impression of a torch singer going through unrequited love.

Few singers I have heard can project such style, elegance and allure, such studied artfulness – opposed to artifice – as Dalila did that night.

Although Besame Mucho was perhaps the only song the audience was familiar with, the rest of the pieces were not too strange, musically speaking, the beat, sparkle spirit and melodic structure being generally common to all Latin-American songs, the fine, distinctive nuances of rhythm discernible only to each nationality represented.

El Cuarteto which accompanied Dalila greatly enhanced her performance. Candidly, the audience must have concluded that its four members were in varying stages of "greying" or "aging" having played together for 23 years: brothers Miguel Delgado Estevez (guitar) and Raul Delgado Estevez (cuatro, guitar and maracas) and brothers Jose Antonio Naranjo (flutist) and Telesforo Naranjo (double bass).

Yet nothing could have been more wrong than the assumption that these brothers had seen better days as their collective appearance suggested. Their playing conveyed tremendous vitality, energy and robustness, as also refinement, brilliant technique and singular expressiveness — qualities which gave full credence to the claim that El Cuarteto is a leading ensemble in Venezuela, that indeed, each of its members is a master of his instrument. Flutist Naranjo gave fantastically fluid interpretations, his agile fingers providing the melodic lines to the lush harmonizations of the strings.

In-between compositions, the members gave humorous remarks (these translated by a woman offstage) and acted out a few mischievous antics, thus endearing themselves to their listeners even more.

Again, their exquisitely lyrical renditions called to mind, both in style and substance, popular Spanish music. (The program notes tell us that Venezuelan music has absorbed African, Amerindian and European – doubtless Spanish – influences). Expectedly, wild applause broke out when the quartet played Dahil sa Iyo.

Dalila made a second entrance, looking even more soigné and bewitching in another gown of utmost elegance, while amusing the audience now and then with her feeble attempts at Tagalog.

There was thunderous applause throughout the performance, and Ambassador Milona Santana Ramirez must have beamed with pride because it has always been her aim – as expressed in her opening remarks — to bring to the Philippines significant facets of Venezuelan culture.