Keeping 'La Traviata Exposed' real

Music and stage director Camille Lopez Molina

After a lull of three years, the Verdi opera La Traviata returns onstage on Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ayala Museum in Makati City. The reason? "Basically because the right voices for it are there," said Camille Lopez Molina, music and stage director.

The story of Violetta, a courtesan, her ardent suitor Alfredo and his interfering father Giorgio may be a tale as old as time, but it has something to say in the 21st century with the rising incidence of HIV AIDS. The subject of a prostitute with a heart of gold may no longer be "as touchy as it was in Verdi’s time," Lopez Molina observed, "but certainly the issues that made it a sensitive subject still exist: prostitution, class discrimination, sexism."

Anna Migallos as Violetta

Nomher Nival as Alfredo

Asked how she tweaked the opera, which features soprano Anna Migallos, tenor Nomher Nival and bass baritone Noel Azcona with the Viva Voce Ensemble, and why the word "exposed" was added to the title, she answerd, "La Traviata Exposed is just refocusing attention from production aspects--costumes, sets, orchestra, personalities--back to the opera itself (music, text, voices). It serves a two-way purpose which resonates deeply with me. One, to give the singers, a chance to vocally, musically and emotionally connect with the opera--keep it real, so to speak--and two, by doing so, help the audience gain a deeper connection, a more truly ‘up close and personal’ experience of opera itself, not the spectacle of it. Give them a reason to want more of the music, not just the show. Granted, it is a theatrical art form, but the ‘theater’ aspect of it stems directly from the music and the text. Just because we don’t have a full production doesn’t mean we can’t have the full emotional experience of the opera."

For tickets, call Ticketworld at 891-9999 or the Cultural Arts Events Organizer at tel. nos. 782-7164, 0918-3473027 and 0920-9540053. Tickets at Php 1,000, Php 700 (for senior citizens), Php 500 and Php 300 (for students).

Photos from the Facebook accounts of Lopez Molina, Migallos and Nival

Tribute to Mario Lanza: Tenor Nival’s moment in time

Nomher Nival on Mario Lanza:

“I love his voice. We took him up in school. I heard him for the first time around my second or third year at the University of Santo Tomas Conservatory of Music. I love his ‘Because’ because he sang it passionately. He was so romantic and full of energy. He was one of those singers who sang full blast. Contrary to people’s impression that he was shouting, he was actually very intense.”

Read more: Tribute to Mario Lanza: Tenor Nival’s moment in time

Bravi!

Tenor Arthur Espiritu was called by the audience to also render a song after the final ovation for his students. Accompanying him in "La donna è mobile" from the opera Rigoletto is Najib Ismail. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Trust Espiritu to bring out nothing but the best from his 12 disciples. I missed observing his three-day masterclasses the other weekend, but I made sure that I would be back in Manila for "A Night at the Opera" at the Ayala Museum wherein the 12 showed the subtle or obvious changes in their singing and acting after being coached, or to use his own word, "hammered" by their Sir Arthur.

He shared how his workshop concentrated on character, what the young vocal artists were singing about. He was pleased that they responded well. Of this batch, he described them as "among the most beautiful voices I've worked with." Each time he returns to the home country leads to the discovery of "so much talent" here. He lamented at the same time how a lot of these talents do not get the support they need when it is time for important auditions within the country or abroad. Despite their talents, there is not enough support for music artists so they could grab that possibility of making singing their life's passion and commitment.

To the capacity crowd at the museum lobby (a positive sign for classical music events this new year), Espiritu hurled the challenge of continuing to support these artists. Congratulations to the Cultural Arts Events Organizer for taking a big gamble by giving the 12 the opportunity to learn from and closely interact with Espiritu.

Myramae Meneses and Iona Ventocilla play the already affianced but still flirtatious girls Dorabella and Fiodiligi in the aria "Prendero quel brunettino" from Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte.

Mia Ana Tanciongco looks the part in the aria "Porgi Amor" from Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Her song runs: "O Love, give me some remedy!/ For my sorrow, for my sighs! / Either give me back my darling / or at least let me die."

Guildhall London-bound soprano Renee Michaela Fajardo, the only female performer in trousers that evening, stays true to her character Cherubino, a lovesick page boy who sings "Voi che sapete," again from Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro. In Italian, the song mocks love "a feeling, full of desire, / Which is by turns delightful and miserable. / I freeze and then feel my soul go up in flames, / Then in a moment I turn to ice." In the third photo, Teacher Arthur is seen at right watching his student closely. After each workshop participant exited, he greeted him or her with a bear hug, fist bump, high five or firm handshake.

Nomher Nival is a properly emotional Nemorino in Donizetti's "Una furtiva lagrima" from the Italian opera L'elisir d'amore when he sees that a love potion for his snobbish beloved works. An audience member who had heard Nival sing the same aria a year ago said this second time around, he wasn't just hitting the notes, he was feeling each one.

From the top: Carlo Bunyi, Jan Brianne Astom, who sang a beautiful Shakespeare poem "Come away, come away death"
set to music by R. Quilter and Mheco Magalit (in red gown) were the fresh voices we heard for the first time and hope to see and hear more of.

Sexy Roxy Aldiosa socks it to the audience with her coloratura Rosina singing while twirling a cloth flower and purse "Una voce poco fa" from Rossini's The Barber of Seville.

Madness, thy face is Stephanie Quintin who brought the house down with her "Ombre Legere" from Meyerbeer's opera Dinorah. The wonderful thing about a concert of opera highlights is one doesn't have to sit through a three-act, hours-long opera just to hear a famous aria of a woman who loses her husband-to-be on the day of the wedding and is driven mad by the loss.

Nomher (playing Rodolfo) and Anna Migallos as Mimi exit dramatically as they sing their love for each other in "O Soave Fanciulla" from Puccini's well-loved La Boheme.

The faces and the future of Philippine musical theater and opera. Hello world! See you in a few! From left: Carlo Bunyi, pianist Gabby Paguirigan, Jan Briane Astom, Carlo Mañalac, Mheco Magalit, Mia Tanciongco, Stephanie Quintin, Anna Migallos, Myramae Meneses, Roxy Aldiosa, Marielle Tuason, Renee Michaela Fajardo and Iona Ventocilla.

The dreams that he inspired

Jerry Araos and those dreams are alive and growing healthily in The Garden of Two Dragons in Antipolo even as the urn containing his ashes was lowered last Sunday in a corner of The Mandala. The Mandala, the central section of his garden, has always been sacred space. There his immediate family led by widow Melen Araos and participants formed a semi-circle during a short commemorative, celebratory program. After his death on Dec. 23, 2012, and the homecoming of two overseas-based daughters and their families over the holidays, he finally got his send-off party. Yes, there were lumps in some of our throats, a few tears when the music swelled and words of remembrance were spoken. But all in all, like the white butterfly and breeze that passed by, there was Jerry's lightness of being all over the place. Godspeed once more!

For three years, the ashes were stored here on the balcony overlooking the garden. When we'd visit, we'd mentally talk to Jerry as if he were still there.

View from the balcony on a sunny morning

A reproduction of the Jerry who's still written large in our hearts and minds

Violinist Coke Bolipata plays "Amazing Grace" with what we can only call a Southern drawl to the arrangement.

Princess Nemenzo reads Louis Untermeyer's "The Prayer" part of which runs thus: "Ever insurgent let me be, / Make me more daring than devout; / From sleek contentment keep me free, / And fill me with a buoyant doubt."
Jerry handwrote these lines on a piece of paper. At first the family thought that they were his composition until the lines were entered into a Google search. A family member surmised that he may have encountered them while he was a political prisoner.

Waya Araos Wijangco, Jerry's eldest daughter, on the five things she and her siblings learned from their father's example: Live life with courage; live life with purpose; live a life of work; live life generously; and live life in love.

Apart from "The Lord's Prayer," young tenor Nomher Nival sang two of Jerry's favorite Mario Lanza songs: Nicholas Brodszky's "Be My Love" and and Irish tune "Danny Boy." Jerry used to waken his then young children by belting out these songs even if he was a little tone deaf from a childhood accident (he fell off a tree).

Although Pastor Noel Suministrado didn't have the pleasure and privilege of meeting Jerry when he still walked this earth, he could tell that the departed's life was one "lived in passion, a life lived to the fullest." With him inside The Mandala are Mira Araos Mariano, Kulas Besa, Nina Araos, Waya, Ernie and Sam Wijangco, and Dodo Defeo. Dodo recalled in his remarks a "Jerry-ism" that he picked up: how art at its basest is prostitution and how art at its loftiest is philanthropy.

Jerry's lust for life is encoded in the DNA of the next generations: his daughters Liwa and Waya and granddaughters Nina, Sophia Espanola and Amara Encabo. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Master class with Maestra Nelly | Vera Files

Master class with Maestra Nelly | Vera Files

A little afternoon music in one's brief life

Soprano Myramae Meneses, second from right, with the other members of Viva Voce, leads the singing of Francisco Santiago's "Pilipinas Kong Mahal" that ended the second and last part of "Complicated the Concert" at the Lopez Museum and Library. Photo by Babeth Lolarga

The second time around "Complicated the Concert" was as lovely as the first, if not lovelier and more colorful in terms of costume and production details.

Camille Lopez Molina, Viva Voce founder who also served as assisting artist on the piano to the 10 classical singers (many, if not all, of them her students in voice), promised us earlier: "We've tweaked the program so it will be interesting even to those who saw the first concert."

We were at the May 31 concert, a prelude to June's historical milestones (Rizal's birthday and Philippine Independence Day). During that performance of art songs, from bel canto arias to kundimans, what struck the listener/viewer was the program's potent political content as images from the exhibit of Leslie de Chavez, Mike Adrao and Ea Torrado were flashed on one side of the wall, alternating with more slides of the museum's permanent collection of works by Filipino masters and photos of notorious figures in front-page news. (The exhibit, by the way, has been extended until tomorrow, Aug. 4.)

During the July 19 re-staging at the same venue, the singers' formal wear and an elevated platform that served as stage added a dramatic element. And this time the "tweaking" that Lopez Molina did with the program drew more dramatic responses. This audience member found herself copiously and silently weeping at Kristine Marie Balingcos' interpretation of Catalini's "Ebben, ne andro lontana" from the opera La Wally, a heroine's death aria before she throws herself in an avalanche. It's not an ordinary soprano who can acquit herself with that aria, especially if one has heard versions by Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi or the young Angela Gheorghiu.

Certain types of music invite that kind of visceral response. By the time tenor Ivan Niccolo Nery was singing Schumann's "Stille Tränen," to mean "Silent Tears," with a slide closeup of an unknown man, a survivor of supertyphoon Yolanda aboard a C 130 plane that was evacuating him and hundreds of other survivors from Tacloban, Leyte, my handkerchief was soaked.

Romance filled the afternoon air with soprano Myramae Meneses' "Ah! Love but a Day." Not included in the first staging, this is from a song cycle by American composer Amy Beach with lyrics by the English poet Robert Browning: "Ah, Love, but a day,/And the world has changed!/The sun's away,/And the bird estranged;/The wind has dropped,/And the sky's deranged;/Summer has stopped./Look in my eyes!/Wilt thou change too?/Should I fear surprise?/Shall I find aught new /In the old and dear,/In the good and true,/With the changing year?"

But it was upon hearing for the very first time baritone Raymond Yadao sing Juan Celis Bautista's kundiman "Parang Maghapon Lamang" that one felt as though one's Filipino chest was being cut open without anesthesia. Levi Celerio's haunting lyrics tell of youth wasted. Even if it feels like the length of a life, whether it ends at age 27 or at age 88, is long in earth-time, in the eyes of Eternity, it is only the equivalent of an afternoon.

Ang buhay ko’y maghapon lang pala
Tila isang saglit sa akin ang ngumingiting umaga!
May awit ang ibong tanda ng pag-asa!
Pagsapit ng hapon, ay!, kay lungkot sa puso kong nagdurusa!
Kung katotohanan ay ganyan,
Bakit sinayang ko yaong unang sigla ng aking buhay!
Di na magbabalik kahit na kaylan man
O! ang buhay pala ay parang maghapon lamang!

Camille Lopez Molina and Myramae Meneses bracket two similarly dressed music fans (the blogger and Mercy Lactao Fabros).

With Manila Chamber Orchestra Foundation's Joseph Uy, tenors Nomher Nival and Ivan Niccolo Nery. Joseph once reassured me during a sad period in my life (I never seem to run out of these periods): "A golden tone from a good singer's voice erases all the frustrations in life." Amen to that, Joseph, amen.

Clear, uncomplicated, thought-provoking | Vera Files

Clear, uncomplicated, thought-provoking | Vera Files