An enchanting evening

Paul Potts turns 38 today. He’s somewhere in Taiwan. On the heels of his solo night performance at the PICC last Wednesday are three concerts lined up, starting tomorrow until Saturday the 18th — in Taichung, Taipei and Tainan, in that order. So if you missed out on him here in Manila, that’s where you can catch him. Unless you think you can do a Sarah Palin, fly off to Basco, Batanes, climb up a lighthouse and peer across the sea. You might catch him showering (as a small-town Russian mayor said he managed to do with Sarah when he gazed out towards her domain in Alaska).

Whew. Now, that got your attention. Something necessary, since I’ll write the rest of this off the top of my noggin. That’s because I wouldn’t know how to properly review operatic performances.

Hey, suffice it to say that I thoroughly enjoyed that PICC gig, where Paul Potts proved entertaining and exalting, and our own dear soprano Rachelle Gerodias — yes, she with the allure of a Biblical matinee monicker — so enchanting. In fact I’m in love with her and would like to marry her.

But that’s getting ahead of our story, rather, my recollections of that night. First off, I had little sleep the night before, worrying so over friends worldwide who are all crunching over credit. Birds of the same feather, we flock together, flaunt our bad luck together.

Where was I? Ah, yes, in a comfy seat close enough to the PICC Plenary Hall stage to manage grabbing video clips of Mr. Potts encoring with his monster hit version of Nessun Dorma. And before that, my beloved Rachelle’s nearly equally oft-YouTube’d renditions of Mutya ng Pasig and Sa Kabukiran.    

In any case, I was quite concerned that the lovely music might set me off to dreamland. I tend to close my eyes when all other senses are enraptured by superb musical input. Unless it’s acid rock, in which case my eyebags pop out like a toad’s gullet.

I warned my heavy date, someone who must remain unnamed, lest the personage’s academic caliber (in a classy university that just celebrated its Centennial) slide into peril. I sotto voce’d the distinguished consort to nudge me awake should any snoring start to rival the tenor’s sonorous issue before us.

In truth, mine was the confidence that such powerful voices would preempt any portage on my part towards the arms of Morpheus. But classical music is classically sublime, and when I encounter the sublime, I must shield my eyes.

I made an exception of Rachelle, of course. She was just too entrancing to even blink at, especially given the inspired lighting design behind her — concentric arcs in shades of green setting off her fuchsia-clad resplendence. Or at least that’s how it all looks whenever I replay the scene from my cellphone gallery.

Paul would look rather chunky in any CP screen, so I just press the gadget to my ear and listen to his superb strains, despite the inferior quality of recording. And relive that night, Wednesday night.

The rousing opening number, Granada. Sad, somnolent Bring Him Home from Les Miserables. Ahh, Caruso, my fave (which I occasionally hum, since the only Eyetalian I know is “Belissima!”). That last was the fitting finale before the intermission, when everyone made a beeline for the freebie Nescafe Amore 3-in-1.

Love Story. Music of the Night. A Mario Lanza medley of four tunes from The Student Prince. And that was when it dawned on me, how music — “Overhead the moon is beaming/ white as blossoms on the bough/ nothing is heard but the song of a bird...” — engrosses us because it brings us back to a particular moment with which we forever associate a memorable piece.

Whenever I hear Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer, for instance, I am ferried back, perhaps by tricycle, to Bistro ’70s on Anonas Avenue, where the crowd hissed or turned sibilant at the proper cue. 

And when I hear Serenade (also known as Moonlight Serenade), I am transported back to the mid-’50s, walking home on Avenida Rizal with my mom after watching Edmund Purdom and Ann Blythe in the movie The Student Prince, and she tells me it wasn’t Purdom’s voice but Mario Lanza’s. I am 11 or 12 and I nod, and I try to remember the lyrics as she sings the song to me. 

At home, sometimes she interchanges “white” with “right” so that it becomes “bright as blossoms on the bough” — which I begin to think is the most lissome line I had ever heard, with the alliteration (though I still didn’t know it was called that) and the poetic image. Another line was “I hear your voice in the wind that stirs the willows. ...”

My mom had a fine singing voice, something denied me. But I guess her voice and those lines that mesmerized me early were what helped lead eventually to poetry. 

These were the thoughts in my head as Mr. Potts sang on. How songs reframe an episode for us, and how that episode gets so much sweeter (or more bitter, for some people, I guess) when we don’t hear the song for some time, and then suddenly do. 

That’s why I have 21 versions of Whiter Shade of Pale in my iTunes, but don’t play them every day. When I do after a void of weeks, months, I have to have whisky. With Aretha Franklin’s That’s All I Want From You, it’s a different emotion that’s evoked — a strange complex of bright and cheery mood turning sad and wistful, because someone made me sad and wistful long ago.

 When Paul Potts gets to Con te partiro, I shake my head somewhat, afraid that the song has been ruined for me forever by listening too much to Josh Groban’s rendition. Just as I can’t enjoy the “Albinioni Adagio” any more without harking back to the film Gallipoli where it was used as the sorrowful theme. 

But the night ends in triumph with Nessun, as everyone has anticipated, and we are all made happy over our fulfilled expectation.

For Mr. Potts, the fairy-tale story of success has been nothing short of a meteoric rise. It has only been a year and a half since he auditioned, on March 17, 2007, for Simon Cowell’s new show, Britain’s Got Talent. As everyone knows by now, he announced that he’d sing opera, and the judges must have rolled their eyes. At the end of the song, the contestant received a standing ovation from the audience of 2000 people at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

That performance, however unfortunately edited, was shown on television on June 9, 2007. It has since been viewed on YouTube over 34 million times. For the June 14 semi-finals, Potts sang Con te partiro. For the finals, he reprised Nessun, and got two million votes to make him win the show’s first edition and a 100 thou pounds.

His album “One Chance” has sold over two million copies. He is the YouTube superstar who has discussed that Internet phenom with Oprah Winfrey. And he was in Manila last week, and we saw him and heard him, lisping when he spoke, all-powerful when he sang, occasioning further adulation from Pinoys — three of whom have already greeted him Happy Birthday in a website.

A certain Quing wrote: “Happy Birthday, Mr. Paul Potts! You’re (sic) Manila concert was great! You are such an amazing artist. The talent and humility you exhibit never fail to inspire people. I wish you all the best in your career and in your life.

“A good man deserves a good life. Hope you can perform again in Manila.”

Hope so, too. With the divine Ms. Rachelle again, please. By the by, another frivolous ersatz insight that night was that Sa Kabukiran out-Papageno-es Mozart’s Papageno in The Magic Flute. From composing to singing, and remembering music, Pinoys got talent!