Because of heavy rains, there was foreboding that audience attendance would be nil for Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (Op. 25, D. 795) at the Ayala Museum recently. But a good number filled up the hall and extra chairs had to be requested to accommodate the SRO crowd.

Tenor Arthur Espiritu and pianist Najib Ismail were in such high spirit and in such good form their unerring artistic collaboration erased all doubts about song cycles ending in boredomville.

The setting was intimate enough for audiences to hear and feel the music.

The tenor sang as well as he acted and it bode well for the Schubert favorite which was being heard for the first time in its entirety in Metro Manila.

It helped that all the translations of the 20 stanzas were flashed on the screen and indeed, they helped millennials connect to the delicate nuances of a song cycle.

Ismail’s accompaniment provided lyrical backdrop to the story and you could feel the idyllic surroundings as the young man wandered the woods savoring the beauty of rural life.

There is something about Schubert’s music that enhanced imagery of all these countryside scenes. Some quivering parts of the piano indeed duplicated the sound of water rippling in the brooks and the sight of the tenor singing the simple joys of early youth didn’t give you an inkling his youthful fascination over a maid would end up like a contrived soap opera.

Moreover, the tenor gave us a kind of singing that was at once heartfelt enough for the audience to connect to the main character of the song cycle.

The emotional rollercoaster ride of the young man in the song found distinct, if singular, expression in the tenor’s strong interpretative powers. He discarded all operatic temptations to show off his vocal qualities and remained faithful to the text and the music. —CONTRIBUTED