Warwick at 62: The voice remains the same

Dionne Warwick has the gift of making staccatos sound sweet. Her singing is full of what linguists and phoneticians call glottal stops or the "diing maragsa" of our Balarilà days. (Listen, for instance, to the first two lines of That’s What Friends Are For. She arrests the final vowel sounds in the phrases "this way" and "to say" the way a true Tagalog speaker does when he pronounces the word budhî or dagtâ: "may impit sa lalamunan.") Sometimes, her initial hs disappear like some people’s postvocalic rs. Yet the effect is mysteriously musical.

Warwick’s voice, it has been observed by critics and fans alike, has never been powerful. In a noisy department store, it won’t command attention like, say, Celine Dion’s or her niece Whitney Houston’s. It is a voice that doesn’t compel one to listen to it, but which, once heard, identifies itself as uniquely Dionne Warwick’s: it moves listeners by its sheer beauty of tone.

That was what one got at her recent concerts at the Aliw Theater in Star City. At 62, and after 40 years in the recording business, Dionne has managed to preserve much of that voice, its alto warmth and distinct mellow sonority. While the "cracks" were more audible (the voice disappeared altogether when she moved up the scale or tried leapfrogging over more than a few bars), she managed to improvise her way out of difficult situations: she divided lines into short phrases, sang after the downbeat, and bent, not held, long notes. The singing was, in the end, imperfect, but stylish–and it is style that sets one apart.

The evening’s program included the songs that made her the "Bacharach girl" in the 1960s (Close to You, Alfie, What the World Needs Now Is Love, A House Is Not a Home, etc.), her hits from more recent times (I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again and Heartbreaker), and a medley of Brazilian-inspired songs, capped by Do You Know the Way to San Jose?, which had audiences clapping to the beat and even singing along. I Say a Little Prayer, made popular to the current generation by the movie My Best Friend’s Wedding was given a new low-key arrangement, which unfortunately removed its anthem quality. Number after number, Warwick was elegantly understated, perhaps too understated for the title "diva."

On the first night of her concert, she reportedly started the concert at the appointed time even though the theater was still half full and scolded the audience for being tardy. We saw none of that imperiousness on the following evening’s concert, although she would have been right to scold the organizers, who asked her to read the list of sponsors. For a moment the concert was like a noontime variety show, with the host plugging this toothpaste brand and that lozenge. (The fact that the concert was held in the middle of a perya is itself a discomfiting fact. Perhaps the organizers identified her too much with her crystal ball gazing associates at the Psychic Friends Network.)

But when we set that sad fact aside and listened to Dionne sing, we came back to our phonetics lesson. Yes, we heard the impit sa lalamunan, but it left a lump in our throat.