Regine’s singing proves equal to Legrand’s songs

Finding the right singer for his songs must be every composer’s dream. After all, his work remains a series of notations and signatures, black marks on a page undecipherable to the uninitiated, until a voice realizes it. If singer and song connect, the result is electric: the composition comes to life.

That in part explains the continuing appeal of the works of prodigious French composer Michel Legrand: they have been interpreted by the most gifted of singers, each in her distinctive way. Offhand, one names Sarah Vaughan, Jessye Norman, Kiri Te Kanawa, Laura Fygi, Shirley Bassey, and Barbra Streisand; then, to a lesser extent, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, Freddy Cole, and Johnny Mathis.

Legrand’s latest muse is "Asia’s Songbird" Regine Velasquez. At a party held in his honor last year, Velasquez sang Legrand’s composition No Matter What Happens – and the composer was enthralled. Recalls Legrand, "After she sang the first note, I told myself, ‘That’s for me!’" Because of prior commitments, however, Velasquez couldn’t sing at Legrand’s Valentine’s concert that year. He did, however, offer to produce an album for her. Among the 15 songs to be included would be those he had initially written for Barbra Streisand, Velasquez’s favorite vocalist. These are likely from the aborted Life Cycles of a Woman project (ca. 1973), for which, Legrand believes, Streisand "felt she didn’t know enough about life and death" to finish back then. (Two songs, however, are included in Streisand’s Just for the Record box set.)

It seems, then, that Songbird Sings Legrand, a concert held at the PICC Plenary Hall last Valentine’s, was both a fulfillment of a dream long deferred and a foreshadowing of things to come; and going by it, the Velasquez-Legrand collaboration bids fair to sweep listeners away.

Legrand took center stage in the first half of the concert and proved himself an expert in multi-tasking as much as the next CEO. He was conductor one moment and pianist the next. Occasionally, he played the piano with one hand and conducted the 60-piece San Miguel Philharmonic with the other. (In the second half of the concert, he would conduct, play, and sing.) After two short pieces (Summer Me, Winter Me being one of them) came a 45-minute suite from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an early work in which we hear the motifs he would develop in his career. It showed him at his best maestro form, but more astonishing perhaps is his piano playing. At 71, he showed no trace of aging. His fingers glided across the keyboard with such nimbleness as to make the producers of Bengay fear for their business.

After an intermission, songwriter emerged with singer. Legrand seated at the piano and occasionally taking to the microphone, Velasquez sang the evening’s program. It included Legrand’s "signature songs" (What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?, The Windmills of Your Mind, and The Summer Knows), his more "pop" tunes (Something New in My Life and Happy), two songs originally from the Life Cycles project (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow and Once You’ve Been in Love), but also, anachronistically, Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw. The finale was, as expected, a medley from Yentl: Papa, Can You Hear Me? The Way He Makes Me Feel, and A Piece of Sky.

The sense of déjà vu generated by the show’s finale makes one compare Songbird Sings Legrand with Legrand’s Valentine’s concert with Kuh Ledesma last year. That one was more of a hit parade, and in it Legrand’s compositions were rendered with greater stylistic variety. There was also more interaction between singer and songwriter. The papers had warned that the program this year was going to be different, but that didn’t prevent the audience from letting out a collective sigh of disappointment when Legrand announced that the concert was about to end. Apparently, the crowd wanted more, and more of the same.

The more important matter, however, is whether or not Velasquez is the songbird for Legrand’s compositions. Legrand loves to write long and loopy phrases which require not only vocal amplitude but also, and more importantly, intelligent interpretation. Sheer lung power is not enough. Now we all know that Velasquez is primarily a belter and that apparently she has been following a singing philosophy similar to the motto of the Olympic Games: "highest, loudest, and longest" (pataasan ng boses, palakasan ng sigaw, at pahabaan ng hininga). The threat of the songs drowning in Velasquez’s overpowering voice, an instrument as much lauded as derided, was all too real.

Much to her credit, however, her singing at the concert was equal to the song. Velasquez substituted expression for exclamation, tempering what would have been merely strident. When a lift was called for, she soared and took the audience with her. There is a glimpse of the "Sky beyond the sky" in her rendition of A Piece of Sky –that rare sensation of plenitude when the song and singer are one.

Such a performance makes us wonder how she would sound in the Legrand album when it comes out later in the year. Would she be as expressive as, say, Judy Garland, conveying depths of emotion by tonal shifts and suggestive phrasing rather than by sheer volume? It would be interesting, for example, to hear how she would interpret Pieces of Dreams (a.k.a. Little Boy Lost), one of Legrand’s "softer" pieces. By what means would she bring out the wisdom of the song’s persona or the symbolism of "fishing in streams / for pieces of dreams"? Whatever the technique, the singer’s job is to breathe life into the song. If the concert is any indicator, Velasquez is likely to do just that.