by Cecilia Ortiz Luna
In many ways, I was fated to love music, not least for having been named after its patron saint, an act of magical thinking by an ironically tone-deaf father. A big swath of my childhood memory involved the steady stream of songs in the house. My father regularly played his vinyls of the Sandpipers, Connie Francis, and Victor Wood. When he wasn’t playing music, he was tuning in to television shows featuring Armida Siguion Reyna, Sylvia La Torre, and Pilita Corrales.
What he loved most was listening to choral music. When I became a member of a college choir, we would practice in one of the school gazebos two evenings a week. Tatay would sit in the adjoining gazebo while he waited to take me home, listening blissfully as we rehearsed Panis Angelicus in eight-part harmony.

For Tatay, the choral group to rule them all was the UP Madrigal Singers, also known as “the Madz”. Together, we would watch these choristers on our black and white TV, the men dressed in their barong tagalog, and the women in their Balintawak dresses or terno. Unlike regular choirs, the Madz members were seated in a semicircle, at the center of which their choirmaster, the bespectacled Professor Andrea O. Veneracion, sang with them. I remember how Tatay and I were awestruck the first time we heard Lucio San Pedro’s “Sa Ugoy ng Duyan,” which the Madz sang as this sweet, slow, sublime lullaby.
When I studied at UP Diliman in the 90’s, I roamed the tree-canopied campus, aware that somewhere inside Abelardo Hall, Professor Veneracion and the latest incarnation of the Madz were rehearsing their pieces. While waiting for the UP Ikot jeepney, I would see posters announcing their concerts and sigh with longing. I wanted so badly to hear them live, but due to the exigencies of higher education, marriage, and motherhood, I never had the opportunity.
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Fast-forward to 2024. By this time, my father had passed on, and I was already living in Canada with my family.
One morning, while the Calgary winter petulantly refused to give way to spring, I saw the announcement on my Facebook feed: the Philippine Madrigal Singers are coming to Calgary on April 24. I didn’t even check my calendar to see if I had prior appointments. I whipped out my credit card, clicked on the online ticket seller, and hit buy. Three tickets. I would bring my husband and my eldest daughter for two reasons: to share the glorious Madz music with them, and to apologize to people I might have to trample over to get to the singers and beg them for selfies.
On the appointed day, the weather had none of its winter bite, but it was chilly enough to remind the Filipinos flocking to Parkdale United Church that this is still Calgary, y’all. We came early to secure seats with a good sightline to the altar, where seventeen chairs were arranged in a semicircle (the famous Madz semicircle!). The church was packed to the gills with fellow Filipino community members. There were also several non-Filipinos, who were drawn to the event to experience the vocal splendours of this world-class choir. The excitement that sizzled underneath my faux-calm exterior was what I would characterize as “early Manny Pacquiao pay-per-view.”
A few minutes past seven o’clock, a hush slowly fell on the crowd. The lead coordinator for the Madz’ Alberta leg of the tour, Kehrl Reyes, stepped up to the mic and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Philippine Madrigal Singers.”
Seventeen individuals, wearing broad smiles and black-motifed barong tagalog and Balintawak dresses with jewel-toned sashes, walked down the aisle and toward the altar. I couldn’t believe it. The Madrigal Singers, whom my Tatay and I worshipped, were here.
The men and women sat alternately, which meant that everyone would be sitting between two singers from different vocal parts. Maestro Mark Anthony Carpio stood at the center and made his introductions. I could only imagine how we looked from his vantage point. Three hundred Calgarians, dressed in our Sunday best, eagerly awaiting to experience the choral music described as “the most beautiful sound on earth” — hyperbolic, maybe, but surely not by much.
Maestro Carpio told the crowd that the first piece would be the Prayer of St. Francis. He then returned to his seat, the leftmost chair in the semicircle. With just his eyes and a slight movement of his head, he signaled for his charges to begin.
I held my breath.
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The Madz started as the University of the Philippines Madrigal Singers (UPMS), organized in 1963 by Professor Andrea O. Veneracion from among the students, faculty, and alumni of the different colleges of UP. Ma’am OA, as Professor Veneracion was fondly called, named the choir after the madrigal, a form of vocal chamber music popular during the Renaissance that was poetry-based, polyphonic, and technically challenging.
The group became the Philippine Madrigal Singers upon their designation as the resident choral company of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. They have performed for popes, royals, and heads of state, and they have won multiple awards and accolades from all over the world. They were the first choir in the world to win the prestigious European Grand Prix for Choral Singing twice (1997 and 2007) and the first Asian choir to be accorded the BrandLaureate Premiere Award by the Asia Pacific Brands Foundation (2012).
In its sixty years of existence, the Madz’s repertoire had consistently kept to its Renaissance roots, but it always included a number of Filipino songs in pursuit of Ma’am OA’s vision of a “Singing Philippines”.
The current Madz choirmaster, Mark Anthony Carpio, was handpicked by Ma’am OA to be her successor, and started his tenure in 2001. Maestro Carpio was a countertenor extraordinaire whose choral expertise has led the choir to ever-greater heights, continuing the tradition of bringing Madz music to the world. Their ongoing four-month Canada trip (from April to July) is billed as their IntenSIXTY Tour, celebrating the choir’s 60th anniversary. It is a coast-to-coast tour with stops in several major Canadian cities. Fortunately, one of the cities on their slate was Calgary.
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When the Madz sang the pieces from the first of their two sets, the open beams, stained-glass windows, and oak pews of the church faded away, and the listeners were transported, first to the cathedrals of Renaissance Europe, then to a sultry East Asian forest. Piece after piece, all of us in the crowd sat entranced, caught as we were in this wonderful spell that the Madz had cast with just their voices.
Listening to bass singer Nathan Mangune’s solo rendition of “Deep River” was a profoundly moving experience. His quietly powerful basso profundo perfectly conveyed a supplicant’s longing for deliverance. When he sang with the choir, his voice gave the harmonies its clean low register.
When the first set ended, the singers departed the altar. I was at an existential cusp, despairing that the concert was halfway over, and glad that there was still one more set. I used the ticking minutes of the break to strategize how to ambush one or two or eight of the singers, preferably also the maestro, for photos after the show.
When the singers reemerged, they wore new outfits — beige barongs for the men, and colorful printed tops over black dress pants for the women — to signal that we were now in the second half of the program.
The Madz charmed the audience with a slew of Filipino traditional songs from Ilocos and Cebu. They then hopped over to the Tagalog region with “Leron, Leron Sinta” and a trio of Tagalog love songs.
Then came what I considered the highlight of the second set – the Madz’ rendition of “Paubaya” by Moira De La Torre. Each of the sopranos and altos claimed a verse of the song to sing solo. It felt to me like this was the piece that the female singers loved singing the most. The song key was in the middle range, allowing the vocalists to sing in their normal voices, and with as much emotion as one could imbue a song about letting a beloved go. (We Filipinos sing heartbreak really well, and we also love listening to it.) The silence and the quiet sighs of the audience signified a collective sliding into “senti” mode, to which Adriane Calangian kept them captive for a few minutes more while he enraptured us with “Ikaw Ang Lahat Sa Akin”.
The Madz didn’t let us wallow in sadness for too long. They proceeded to sing a humorous 90’s song, “Papa Ka Ba” by DJ Alvaro. Soloist Alrose Jane Salve hammed it up, to the crowd’s delight. There was laughter all around every time the choir got to the “papa” chorus: “Papakainin ka, papaliguan pa, papatulugin at papaypayan, papaligayahin kita!”
The show ended with an exhilarating rendition of Ryan Cayabyab’s “Kay Ganda Ng Ating Musika”, which brought the audience to their feet. For a lively song, it was a sobering reminder that “ating musika” was among the things we had left behind in the country that, despite the change in our domiciles and citizenships, will always be our native and beloved land.
It was the very best kind of concert experience — one where the performers bring you a piece of home, and in return, you surrender to them a piece of your heart.
And reader, I got my selfies.
