By Robert Croan
The second half of the program offered Feb. 21 by Chamber Music at Lauderdale-by-the-Sea — a concert series at the Community Church on Bougainville Drive — was devoted to original Filipino music by composers whom most American music lovers have not heard of: Nicanor Abelardo, Lucio San Pedro, Rodolfo Cornejo, Manuel Velez — and not least, Ernesto Vallejo, a genuine martyr who at the age of 35 was murdered in his home by Japanese soldiers during the Battle of Manila in 1945.
Presented by the FilAm Music Foundation, the concerts feature and support Filipino classical musicians, along with Western rising artists performing with the superb pianist and series director Victor Santiago Asunción. In budget and scope it’s a modest undertaking, but in the quality of the music making, the performances are on a much higher scale.
On this occasion, most of the evening showcased Asunción in combination with 26-year-old violinist Adrian Nicolas Ong, who made his New York debut with Asunción at the piano in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 2023. The present concert also introduced a younger Filipino pianist, Zion Pe Montebon, currently working towards a degree locally at Boca Raton’s Lynn University Conservatory of Music.
Ong and Asunción opened the concert with two staples of the violin repertory. Warming up on Saint-Saens’ glitzy but superficial Havanaise (Op. 83), they moved on quickly to the most substantial work on the docket, Grieg’s happy and melodious Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor. Ong’s sweet, singing sounds intermingled aptly with the pianist’s richly vibrant underpinning. The keyboard statement of the folk-like tune that dominates the middle movement was a lesson in legato, as the violinist emulated the piano’s color and phrasing in the manner of a musical conversation. The finale was sharply rhythmic and collaboratively exuberant.
Montebon at first suffered by comparison with Asunción’s distinctive multichrome tonal palette, starting with a pallid rendition of the Menuet from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. He quickly showed his true chops, however, in a quite breathtaking rendition of Prokofiev’s Toccata in D Minor (Op. 11) – a fiendishly difficult piece that sounded (and looked) as if he were playing with four hands rather than two. Its percussive repetitions anticipated the sound canvases associated with American minimalist composer Steve Reich.
Montebon followed with the first Filipino segment, which showed his ability to adapt his formidable technical skills to a diversity of styles. While all the Filipino pieces seemed to emulate Western musical tradition, there was a wide difference between their adapting a classical versus a popular character. San Pedro’s Aliwan was a rondo on an elfin melody in pop/dance rhythm, while Cornejo’s Reminiscences, though called an etude, was more like a Chopin nocturne on a dreamy theme. A second Cornejo work, Okaka, a set of tuneful variations on a Philippine folk song, could easily have passed for a comparable work by the young Beethoven, or perhaps Beethoven’s younger contemporary in the piano world, Carl Czerny.
Asunción and Ong returned for the final grouping. A habanera-like folk song called “Sa Kabukiran” was the version by Velez (1907-77), not to be confused with an entirely different song made popular in recent times by the late Freddie Aguilar. Two works by Abelardo (1893-1934) were in the style of late 19th-early 20th-century salon music.
This powerful duo concluded their official program with Vallejo’s inspirational and joyful Habanera Filipina, then offered as an encore for the Filipino contingent: “Kahit Isang Saglit” (“Even just for a moment”), a poignant pop song that Asunción says, “hits close to home because almost every Filipino in the audience left the Philippines in search for a better life. Hence, this deep sense of longing and missing someone so dearly.” You didn’t have to be Filipino to share their highly emotional message.