Of hell and high water

Before you can say the tongue-twister "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood," the 2004-2005 concert season of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra will already be over. On April 8, Maestro Eugene Castillo, music director and principal conductor of the country’s premier orchestra, and his ensemble served their closing concert at St. Cecilia’s Hall at St. Scholastica College.

By this late hour, the admirers and detractors of this musical vanguard knew that each concert this season was organized according to a theme. This time, it’s "For Hope and Freedom," the variations on the thematic idea being the pain of the prisoner pining for liberation.

The opener was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, one of four overtures the composer essayed for his only opera, Fidelio. The opera is about the dutiful wife who disguises herself as a young man to get into the jail where her husband is incarcerated as a political prisoner. Resident conductor Maestro Cecinio Ronquillo and the PPO served a creditable account of this old warhorse.

Of greater interest is Francisco Feliciano’s Voices and Images. Conceived in the postmodern idiom, this work uses a lullaby by the composer, inspired by the poem by National Artist Rolando Tinio, "Sleep through the Night." One voice among many voices is that of the mother singing the lullaby "sometimes heard, sometimes blurred, sometimes lost" in the helter-skelter of instrumental sounds, some martial and menacing, some mournful, elegiac, still others soulful, idyllic. This is a work that merits more than just passing interest. And Maestro Castillo and the PPO delivered an eminent reading of this fascinating score.

The main feature of the concert was Sir Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. This oratorio by the contemporary British composer is solidly based on a tradition in musical form that dates back to J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel, though it minimizes the Baroque contrapuntal complexities of their era.

Tippett’s own libretto centers around the true story of a Jewish boy who flees to France to escape from the Nazi pogrom in Poland. His killing of a diplomat at the German Embassy in Paris results in the execution of his parents in a Nazi concentration camp and his own mysterious disappearance. Deeply touched by his fate, Tippett exposes in his oratorio the horrors of a regime bent on the systematic annihilation of the Jewish race.

As in this composer’s other work in this same genre, A Mask of Our Time, A Child of Our Time is an opus mounted on titanic proportions. Soprano Rachelle Gerodias, alto Clarissa Ocampo, tenor Ramon Acoymo, baritone Andrew Fernando, The Philippine Madrigal Singers, University of the East Chorale, Manila Chamber Singers, Coro de San Sebastian and Coro de Santa Cecilia joined the PPO in telling the tale of a boy engulfed by the horrors of the holocaust.

Tippet added to his composition Negro spirituals to underscore the theme of persecution and racial prejudice. If the mammoth concept failed to touch the heart, it may be because of the patchwork effect – bits and pieces strung together but seeming not to constitute a unified whole, leaving the listener cold and apathetic to the plight of the oppressed, as apathetic as Europe when the Nazis were throwing hundreds of thousands of Jews into their gas chambers.

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Over at the Globe Theater Onstage in Greenbelt 1, Repertory Philippines is drawing crowds to its current attraction, Ray Cooney’s comedy Whose Wife is it Anyway? For the first time in its history, the company is transplanting the setting of a British play from its native soil to the Philippines.

Outrageous? Not at all. Politicians everywhere are blood brothers when it comes to chasing delectable females. Propriety be hanged! Morality be damned! Can they resist the lure of the flesh? Deny the call of desire?

Not Congressman Richard Willey (Miguel Faustmann) of the administration party who is supposed to attend a deliberation of his cohorts at the Pearl Hotel along Roxas Blvd., but he has arranged an assignation with curvaceous Jane Villalobos (Ana Abad Santos-Bitong), the secretary of the opposition leader. Richard makes excuses to his wife, Pamela (Joy Virata), for not coming home, so that she just has to make do with Stephen King. Jane also has to concoct a tale to explain to her husband, Ronnie (Arnel Carrion), why she won’t be home on this night.

The Hotel Manager (Robbie Guevara), a bewigged, self-righteous ass, is suspicious of the goings-on in Room 648. The Waiter (Niccolo Manahan) makes quite a pile in addition to regular tips for extra services rendered to the guests in the same suite.

Complications arise for the amorous legislator when he finds a "dead" body (Raul Montesa) on the window sill of his room. Informing the hotel management or calling the police is out of the question: He can’t afford a scandal. He calls up his factotum, George Santos (Joel Trinidad), to come quickly and fix up the mess. It’s a lucky politician who has a faithful man-Friday like George who will leave an ailing mother in the care of a nurse like Gladys Maalat (Pheona Baranda) and help him out of trouble, and who will stage a wedding with the Visayan Maid, Maria (Marisse Borlaza), and more outrageous shenanigans ensue to get his boss out of trouble.

It must be great fun for director Baby Barredo, her artistic and technical staff and her amazing cast of talents to present this comedy. She must also be an astute and a very convincing director to get Carrion and Pheona to bare their respective asses for art’s sake.

This comedy has piles and piles of laughter – more than you can repeat every 10 minutes "Sally Shelley is selling seashells by the seashore."

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