Camille Lopez Molina and her love of music and singing

Camille Lopez Molina

The word “chiaroscuro” may be inextricable from the world of painting. This hasn’t stopped soprano Camille Lopez Molina and pianist Najib Ismail from choosing it to be part of their coming concert’s title, “Love in Chiaroscuro,” on Sept. 15 at 7 p.m. at the Ayala Museum in Makati.

While they brainstormed about the repertoire, they started choosing songs based on what they felt strongly about. Molina said, “You want your audience to enjoy your performance. But they only receive and reciprocate the performers’ own enjoyment. The terms ‘nuance,’ ‘expression,’ ‘colors,’ ‘shades,’ ‘levels,’ ‘layers,’ ‘contrasts’ can refer to the voice, text, music and personal references. Chiaroscuro, referring to the play of light and shade in painting, drawing, photography and other visual arts, seemed to be the word that articulated most clearly what we meant.”

Among her personal preferences in the program are: Liszt’s “Sonata de Petraca,” Wagner’s portrayal of love in “Wessendonk Song,” “Song to the Moon” from Dvorak's “Rusalka” which, by the way, she voiced in the Peque Gallaga film “Sonata” wherein Cherie Gil played a diva who had seen better days.

Although Molina sings with the vocal ensemble Viva Voce of which she is founder-artistic director, she seldom holds solo concerts. “Love in Chiaroscuro” is the first since 2010. After her students Myramae Meneses, Renee Michaela Fajardo and Anna Dinah Migallos were featured in the concert “Divas: The Beauty of the Soprano Voice” in April this year, Joseph Uy of the Cultural Arts Events Organizer and Manila Chamber Orchestra Foundation (MCOF) asked this writer to go up to Molina to the holding room and tell her she was being lined up next on the second half of this year.

She recalled with a laugh, “The decision was clinched for me. I was given a date and told to have a recital. ’Yun na ’yon (That was that)!” As two of the country’s top voice teachers, she and her husband Pablo are overjoyed at the triumphant acceptance of Fajardo and Meneses at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and recently, Migallos’s being the star of the night at an Indonesia Opera Society event in Jakarta.

She said on the effectiveness of her team teaching with Pablo: “His is the technical brain. I’m more on the application and interpretation. There is a sense of validation which is fulfilling (when our students make it abroad). After the initial thrill, it always boils down to what are we doing next? What else can be improved? There’s always something to improve, if not vocally, then maybe physically, or as is usually the case, mentally. Singing is coordination, a synthesis of physicality, emotions, artistry, intellect, energy, etc. Since we are constantly evolving as human beings, then the process of learning is never-ending.”

Ismail assured that Thursday’s concert would have hugot songs, meaning, the song’s interpretation comes from somewhere deep. Molina said, “Najib and I are similar in how we go into the music so our repertoire is a true collaboration. We bounce opinions back and forth. He knows my voice and what I can do. I know him and what he loves to play. So yes, these songs are straight from our hearts and guts.”

Asked to comment on the film “Florence Foster Jenkins” and its tone-deaf protagonist, she said, “I loved it. It expressed so much of what lovers of music feel, of what all musicians and artists feel about their craft. It wasn’t about Florence’s lack of talent, but how much she loved singing because she loved the music.”

For tickets, call Ticketworld at 891-9999 or the MCOF, tel. nos. 997-9483, 782-7164 or cell phone nos. 0920-9540053 and 0918-347-3027.

Published in the online edition of Philippine Daily Inquirer, Sept. 14, 2016

Through painting, this artist and cancer survivor ‘weeps without shedding tears’

Through painting, this artist and cancer survivor ‘weeps without shedding tears’

On World Teachers' Day, Mrs. E Once Again

Dedicated to the committed teachers in my family:

Rolly & Ida Fernandez, Eileen & Suzy Lolarga & Auntie Linda

"Hey, Teach, your hips are too wide!"--student Junald to Teacher Babeth

I considered myself a successful teacher on some level when my high school student in a weekly elective on creative writing came up to me recently after I laid my bag down on the classroom table and said that to my face with no inhibition. In the Catholic school where I grew up, he would've been called impertinent and sent to the guidance counselor's office.

I came into teaching rather late in life--at age 55. I held back for many years, despite worthy offers, because I held the profession in high esteem that I felt I had to accumulate decades of experience in my field of specialization and get almost browbeaten by life before I had the "K" or right to stand in front of a roomful of students. Yes, there were the summer workshops and weekend writing seminars I conducted but not the everyday commitment that real teaching required. At those workshops, I insisted on being addressed "Tita", not by any honorific like "Ma'am" or "Teacher."

The lessons learned from Nieves Benito Epistola or Mrs. E, the late professor emeritus of the University of the Philippines Diliman, have truly been internalized in midlife. She was genuinely interested in what her students were doing and talking about. In conversations, she would use the hip expression in current use.

Once, after a heavy lunch, she hailed a cab, then turned to me once we were inside, "Let's smoke in my office and watch the smoke rings come out of our mouth!" This was decades before the UP campus became a no-smoking zone.

Or, when a new shopping center ("mall" wasn't the common term then) went up, she'd eagerly invite me to "case the joint."

When her colleague and friend Dolores Stephens Feria was released from prison and returned to the university after years spent underground, she told Mrs. E, "Looking around, everyone has grown old and gray, except you, Nieves." That same day, Mrs. E rushed to Cubao and bought a pair of denim jeans.

She enlarged my world, she and husband SV bringing me to art exhibitions, foreign film festivals, Palanca Awards Night, concert halls, an orchid show at UP Los Baños and introducing me to a Who's Who in the arts and culture arena. She took it upon herself to gather my sheaf of poems and practically badger editor Franklin Cabaluna into publishing them in the literary section of his soft-porn magazine, Fina. She gave me the highest recommendation in my first reportorial job. She had my survey forms for my undergrad thesis mimeographed and disseminated by her own students to lessen my feelings of being overwhelmed at the academic requirements before me. And when my first book of poems was published and launched, she barged into the publisher's office the next day, demanding to buy the unsold copies.

Her carport-turned-porch on M. Viola street was a magnet for "kindred spirits," she called us, on Sundays in the early '80s; we hanged out there right after breakfast, overstretching the couple's hospitality by staying on till early dinner. Actress Gigi Dueñas quipped, "Mabuti na lang di alam ni Imelda (Marcos) about High Tea with the E's or else gagayahin niya rin."

This generosity of spirit, the sticking out of one's neck for one's student even way after she has graduated, is mostly lacking in teachers I've encountered when I went back to school at the same university in this decade. Overweening ambition/careerism, I surmise, generally defines the academics of today. Mrs. E once took the young instructors in the English department to task in a poem, dismissing them as "these young competitresses."

Even as she rose to become associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters, she did not demand an office with a view or one equipped with comforts and staff befitting the post. I still visited her at faculty room number 1118, the one assigned to her after she returned from Harvard and her other colleagues had earlier picked out the better located rooms. She gave me the spare key to that room one summer so I could concentrate on my freelance writing assignments when I was in between jobs. Later, I learned that she was not wont to do that with just anyone.

I suppose that was Mrs. E's personal and affirming legacy to me, the one I wish to pass on to my students: that I am, and they are, special.

"Hey, Teach, nice pants!"--Carem to Teacher Babeth

Poster grabbed from Gwenn Galvez's Facebook page