Coke Bolipata the violin man

The violinist Alfonso "Coke" Bolipata has never finished watching the movie "The Red Violin," the story of varied twists and turns surrounding the instrument through the ages, including episodes erotic as well laced with intrigue.

"But I’ve watched parts of it," Coke says, on a Saturday afternoon just after dress rehearsal and hours before a performance with orchestra at the CCP, a concerto by Bartok on the program.

Bolipata represents the third generation of musicians in his family, his maternal grandfather Ramon Corpus a pioneer of the Manila symphony orchestra, while uncles and siblings have also taken up instruments, most notably the violin.

And though Coke has been raised in a culture of violins, any story on the Corpus-Bolipata musical lineage woud have episodes not likely to merit it an R- rating. At least none that we know of.

Coke co-founded the Manila Chamber Orchestra (MCO), the orchestra he is playing with this evening. He commutes around twice a week to and from his base in San Antonio, Zambales–where scholars of the Pundaquit orchestra hold fort –and his digs in Katipunan, very near Miriam College where he has regular music classes.

The commute, all in all, takes some four hours, through landscape rearranged by lahar and maybe a memory of codas.

Pundaquit has been in existence for about a dozen years now, and they currently have 120 scholars whose tuition ranges anywhere from P2,000 to P11,000 a semester. Thirty of the students stay in at the CASA, or the Center for the Arts in San Antonio.

"Many of the children have OCW parents, so they can easily pay $200 (P10,000)," Coke says.

The youngest student he has had so far was a three-year-old. "The younger they start with the instrument, the better," he says, likening the craft to gymnastics where it is best to learn when bones are still pliable.

While he admits that it is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, "we once had a 17-year-old who started on the instrument, and is now quite fast."

Pundaquit orchestra presently has no CD out, but one is definitely in the works, most probably a double CD back-to-back with the Loboc Children’s Choir, with whom it had a very successful concert on the first weekend last January also at the CCP, "Light a Million Mornings."

One of the more memorable numbers in that concert was Handel’s "Messiah." But just because it was played by kids, Bolipata at once disabuses us of the notion that "Messiah" is an easy piece to play.

"It’s fairly popular especially during Christmas time," he says, adding that the piece is considered for stage 3 students, perhaps equivalent to Grade 3.

For Coke, "Baa Baa Black Sheep" is the first piece he ever learned on violin.

At the CASA, they have 40 violins and six cellos for use of the students, but Bolipata says "eventually, we encourage them to buy their own insruments."

Coke’s "baby," on the other hand, is a violin more than a hundred years old ("dates back to late 19th century") that was bought for him by his parents in New York. At around the time when he, Coke, was less than a hundred years old.

As for the Bartok concerto he would be playing in a few hours, Coke says that he has been practicing it for more than a year. "It is a difficult piece," he says.

A few bars we had a chance to hear at the tailend of dress rehearsal evoke images of a stalker, albeit a somewhat comic stalker. Full of unpredictable bridges and segues, the violin hovering over the proceedings like the shadow of a steeple.

"He (Bartok) wrote it for his lover," Coke says of this particular circa World War 2 work by the Hungarian composer.

Another composer whose work Bolipata would also like to learn to play is the Austrian AlbanBerg, also a postwar master.

"After the war there were already 12 notes to a scale, from the usual eight," the violinist says, a development that dramatically altered the full range of dynamics, not to mention harmonics.

It is these postwar pieces that Bolipata wants to play, after his having grown tired of Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

Does he himself write pieces? Bolipata shakes his head, and says, "I leave that to the masters." Leading up to the concert, Coke has been practicing for at least five hours a day, that’s apart from the ensemble rehearsals. Normally, he says that he practices at least a couple of hours daily, but he doesn’t always fulfill this minimum, self-imposed requirement.

There are times too that he doesn’t feel like picking up his baby, but this is very rare.

"It is always hard to justify classical music," Coke says.

He recalls how in the late 1990s he was one of the prime movers of a series of Misa de Gallo concerts that did the rounds of churches in Metro Manila for nine nights during the Christmas season.

But there were times when attendance was so bad, Coke says, "there was one performance where the church had only four people in the audience, including Tita King Kasilag when she was still up and about."

Coke says that people were very likely tired after a hard day’s work and would rather be watching their usual Mexican or whatever telenovela than sitting in a church listening to classical music.

It was fun while it lasted though, during the three years it ran, with full orchestras on the first and last nights, and chamber variations on the ordinary nights.

Coke is, however, confident that something can be said for the classics, especially in the age of globalizaton. The misinformed might be delighted to learn that there are violin concertos composed by Filipinos, e.g. Abelardo and Pajaro. CASA, meanwhile, is the Bolipatas’ way of instilling into the community a sense of music older than their ancestors.

Now as we sit in the almost silent theater watching the few remaining players still honing their instruments on stage, Coke points to some of them–there a student of his at Miriam, another one he taught at UST, and so forth. The informal tapestry of sounds reminds us of times we wandered near the UP Conservatory on Diliman campus, the impromptu rehearsals, vocalizations, the plain ambling about the scales sowly building up into not exactly a cathedral, but an aural carillon.

Coke says he taught once at JASMS, where the kids are relaxed and allowed to develop at their own pace, "like in Montessori."

In less than a couple of hours he will be onstage again, fronting the MCO for the Bartok concerto. There will be an audible hush as the curtains open, then after a tap of the conductor’s baton, Coke cradling his baby as he strikes the first breathless note long after the sun has set in the bay older than our ancestors.