Benefit concerts and barangays

Last night's benefit concert for the Casa San Miguel at Equitable PCI Bank here in Manila went very well. By ourselves, we performed Mozart's Horn Quintet (with Casa San Miguel teacher Lorenzo "Chong" Raval), Philip Glass Quartet No. 5, Ricardo Romaneiro's Sextet, and Andrew Roitstein's arrangement of the gypsy tune "Rustem."

With the Pundaquit Virtuosi, the string ensemble of the Casa, we played Gershwin's Lullaby. Little Julian Duque joined us for Vivaldi's A Minor Concerto and was a sensation. After that, I gave a speech exhorting the crowd to give to the Casa San Miguel, an organization I admire tremendously for its commitment to preserving the arts and to bringing their beauty to children from the provinces. MFTP is proud to be associated with the Casa. Who knows but that one day, someone like little Julian will rise from a humble fishing villages to grace the concert stages of the world?

The charismatic and brilliant founder of Casa, Coke Bolipata, joined JoAnna and myself for a round robin version of the Bach Double.

Recently, Chong commented that he was impressed with the fact that I cared about the difference between a bayan and a barangay. "Most Americans would not make the effort to learn how Filipinos think" about their different types of civil administration, he said. To my horror, I found a casual reference on this blog to my driving into "the barangay" to check the internet. Casa San Miguel is in San Miguel, a "barangay" (district) of San Antonio, the "bayan" (larger town) where the internet cafe is located.

Since Chong made such a point of how impressed he was by my commitment to understanding this distinction, let me apologize for this error.