in what could be the american idol of the operatic world, a makati born pinoy made it to the final four.
last sunday, tenor rodell aure rosel, a ucla alum, together with two sopranos, and a bass of modest range were adjudged winners in this year’'s met national council auditions. they bested close to 1,500 other would be operatic stars.
quite a number of singers who floored the judges in the annual competitions early in their careers have now been regularly performing at the met, the likes of superstar sopranos renee fleming and deborah voigt.
and it could very well be that a filipino tenor would soon be singing regularly at the most spectacular opera house in the world. a filipino musician no longer on the margins of the american, nay, western cultural zeitgeist.
on the other end of the spectrum, a filipino expat filmmaker, lav diaz, has continued to successfully entrench himself at the periphery. this by insisting not to whittle down his 630 minute, humorless film he titled quite melodramatically ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang pilipino (evolution of a filipino family).
not to be facetious about it - but why not?- but just how does one psyche oneself to attend this forbidding event which requires a brave, if not foolhardy, ten and a half hours to waste, i mean, watch? does one take bladder numbing pills? does one bring five packed lunches wrapped in smoked banana leaves?
this morning, flushed from the winning filipino tenor news, i disingenuously steered a breakfast conversation i had with a fellow nurse to opera.
i didn't know you have an operatic tradition in your country? she said. stumped, i told her we don't, then i told her i love her new duty shoes.
just what do you do for fun, anyway? she probed. who do you mean you? i was being testy. your people back home, she answered. uhmm, movies? i blanked out.
primo levi, the italian author, once wrote that the bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.
upon reaching home, i searched in my online music subscription service for the comic jour et nuit aria from offenbach's les contes d'hoffmann. this was one of the two arias that our pinoy singer, who bills himself as a character tenor, sang at the contest.
my service doesn't carry it and it got me thinking would anybody be listening soon to aria screaming rosel back home? well, aside from the less than 300 or so subscbribers of the forever cash strapped philippine philharmonic.
so with lav diaz' film. who would waste half of their working day in manila just to watch a film of mostly actors being followed around walking, muttering to themselves and looking pensive for apparently no reason at all?
i know how men in exile feed on dreams, so said the greek master tragedian aeschylus.
in diaz' film, a motley of characters keep on repeating the line hindi tayo pamilya ng mga baliw (we are not a family of lunatics).
here's hoping we're not.
for what a tragedy it would be if these two pinoy expat artists (lav, since his messy divorce, has since repatriated) would continue to be exiled from the main trough of our people's authentic dreams back in our country of the shmaltziest songs and the sappiest movies.