By PABLO A. TARIMAN
WHO would brave a maddening Friday night traffic and a torrential rain to listen to a Schubert song cycle based on 20 stanzas of Wilhelm Müller’s poems about a young man’s journey into doomed love?
Just two hours before the August 26 concert at the Ayala Museum, ominous dark clouds gathered in the horizon and as if on cue, torrential rain blanketed Metro Manila creating another monstrous traffic.
But Schubert was fated for a good reception and just a good one hour before the concert, the rain stopped but one wondered if people would still come.
Fortunately, they did – and not just in trickles – but in such good number they fill up the hall and extra chairs had to be requested to accommodate SRO crowd.
Tenor Arthur Espiritu and pianist Najib Ismail were in such high spirit and in such good form their close, if, unerring artistic collaboration erased all doubts about song cycles ending in boredomville.
The setting was intimate enough for audiences to hear and feel the music.
The tenor sang as well as he acted and it bode well for Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (Op. 25, D. 795) which was being heard for the first time in its entirety in Metro Manila.
It helped that all the translations of the 20 stanzas were flashed on the screen and indeed, they helped millennials connect to the delicate nuances of a song cycle.
Ismail’s accompaniment provided a lyrical backdrop of the story and you could feel the idyllic surrounding as the young man wandered in the woods and savoring the beauty of rural life.
The initial imagery was indeed poetry fused with good music thus –
Wohin? (Where to?) Hearing the rushing of a nearby stream, he merrily follows its path down to the valley, confident that a mill-wheel turns in every clear stream.
Sure enough… for soon amidst the trees he sees a sparkling mill and the gleaming windows of the miller’s house.
There is something about Schubert’s music that enhanced imagery of all these countryside scenes. Some quivering parts of the piano indeed duplicated the sound of water rippling in the brooks and the sight of the tenor singing the simple joys of early youth didn’t give you an inkling his youthful fascination over a maid would end up like a contrived soap opera.
Moreover, the tenor gave us a kind of singing that was at once heartfelt enough for the audience to connect to the main character of the song cycle.
As it was, Espiritu was the young miller personified as he interpreted the first initial songs –“Wohin?” (“Where to?”), “Halt!” (“Stop!”) and “Danksagung an den Bach” (“A Song of Thanks to the Brook”).
The emotional rollercoaster ride of the young man found distinct, if, singular expression in the tenor’s strong interpretative powers. He discarded all operatic temptations to show off his vocal qualities and remained faithful to the text and the music.
As it was, the last songs were indeed harrowing as they described the young man’s moment of agony and hurt.
He was indeed vulnerable as he discovers the other object of affection of the maid (Eifersucht und Stolz” (“Jealousy and pride”).
You get to realize his fate in the last verse (“Des Baches Wiegenlied” (“The brook’s lullaby”) where both pianist and the tenor gave us a glimpse of his life beyond doomed love.
As pianist and tenor intoned the last scene and the inevitable sad ending, you get to reconcile a life meant to be lived and not necessarily enjoyed.
That Schubert could give us a glimpse of emotion distilled by music reminded one of that long forgotten line from John Keats — “a thing of beauty… a joy forever!”
The rousing reception was such tenor Espiritu and pianist Ismail had to do an encore piece, Willie Cruz’s “Sana’y Wala Ng Wakas” arranged by Eunice Pagaduan and the last one, Schubert’s Serenade.
That Friday night performance indeed set a good standard on which to judge future song cycles.
Indeed, it takes a good collaborative pianist and a good interpreter to make song cycles come to life.
The August 26 concert was presented by Cultural Arts Events Organizer and was made possible through grants from Ayala Museum, 98.7 DZFE-FM The Master’s Touch and Lyric Piano.
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