By PABLO A. TARIMAN
CONDUCTOR Helen Quach, popularly known as “Asia’s Queen of the Baton” and “The Lady Tyrant of the Podium” passed away last Wednesday, July 31 in Canberra, Australia after a long battle with breast cancer.
She was 73.
For the record, her last engagements with the Manila Symphony Orchestra and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007 and 2008 ended in rousing standing ovations.
Born in Saigon in 1940 with French music teachers and the eldest in a brood of three, Quach founded an orchestra in Taiwan and Australia, conquered Manila’s music lovers in the 60s onwards. In the Philippines, she conducted her last Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 at the St. Cecilia’s Hall and at the Meralco Theater and with special outreach concerts in Dumaguete City and Bacolod City.
A winner of the 1967 Dmitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition for Conductors in New York, Leonard Bernstein — with whom she worked as orchestra assistant — described her as a “maestra with sharp rhythmic sense and quick reflexes, her address to the orchestra captivating.”
She conducted her last opera, “La Boheme” at the CCP mounted by the Opera Company of the Philippines.
Her last soloist was Filipino pianist Cristine Coyiuto who played the conductor’s last Grieg and Schumann concertos with the MSO and PPO.
Pianist Coyiuto will always remember Quach as “passionate and exacting and determined to bring out the musical lines and colors of any piece.”
The pianist’s flutist-daughter, Caitlin Alisa Coyiuto, remembers the ordinary, yet extraordinary thoughts, feelings, and life of the renowned conductor before she passed away.
She wrote,”Living in Castlecrag in Sydney, Australia, Quach wakes up at 4:30 a.m. for half an hour of spiritual exercises, something she does three times a day. She chants and prays in an activity she calls ‘soul travel,’ which has been the source of her inspirations, ideas and insights. Chanting the word ‘Hu,’ an ancient word for god, she becomes a calmer person, helping her to become less fearful and emotional. When she reaches this level in her meditation, she says she feels that her soul has risen from her body, and that is beyond pain.”
Coyiuto continued“After her prayers, she feeds her collection of wild birds, including kookaburras, kurrawon, crimson parrots, lorikeets and a tawny owl that actually came to her windowsill, She also looks after a cat and three dogs. Her cat Jeddah is ginger white, and has been with her for more than 10 years, a gift from a friend. After feeding her birds, he looks after her dogs, an Alaskan Husky named Zorro, a cross-Labrador called Tinkar, and Blacky, which she named for its long, black, curly hair.”
Asked by Coyiuto what she would ask God if she had the chance to have a single wish, Quach replied: ““Whatever He gives me is the best that I can have. May the blessings be!”
Filipino choir director Myrna Ascutia-Lopez remembers Quach as a very dynamic conductor when she worked with her at the Manila Metropolitan Theater in the performance of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”
“I remember Helen Quach as very sharp and meticulous who can easily get the undivided attention of orchestra, chorus and audience alike with the astuteness of her conducting,” Lopez recalled.
Music critic Antonio Hila also remembers Quach as the epitome of dynamism in conducting. “I remember her conducting Lucio San Pedro’s ‘Sa Dalampasigan’ and I thought she really knew the Filipino music inside and out.”
Before her death, she was smarting from the dissolution of the Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra which she had successfully organized but was suddenly dissolved due to – according to her — political strife. She called it a “soul-searing karmic affair beyond her comprehension!”
Quach wrote an unfinished memoir through the internet in an attempt to find answers and to heal her of terminal breast cancer and to mend her shattered ego and broken heart.
In the first part of that informal memoir recalling her early years in Vietnam, she remembers her French piano teacher who would often play for her just to inspire her.
“I remembered the feeling she would create with her music as in the beginning of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata where the music impelled your mind to follow it; or in the second movement where the sounds led to a rest or silence that was so important. I felt her emotions as she played the Chopin Ballade no.1 and I watched her moan and mumble and hum as she tried to breathe life into her notes. I learnt then that notes were meaningless unless I could put the right feelings into them from one beat to the next,” she wrote.
In a last interview with this author, Quach – whose internment is scheduled on August 8 in Canberra, Australia – once delineated the difference between an artist and an artisan thus: “An artisan is content with a fairly good performance. An artist goes beyond that. An artist shows the way for truth, perfection and beauty.”