Philippine Symphony

In Manila the music season starts just after the rainy season begins. In June wealthy Filipinos return from the country, children start back to school. By August Manila society is ready to converge on the cheesecakey Metropolitan Theater on Plaza Lawton, for the opening night of the Manila Symphony.

The music which dapper Conductor Herbert Zipper led his 86 Filipino musicians through last week had nothing remotely reminiscent of the rumble of a Moro tom-tom. Manilans have been elegantly enjoying their concerts and opera for nearly 300 years, and were ready 15 years ago for the organization of a full-out orchestra. With precision and grace last week it swung through Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, Glazounov's Une Fete slave. Jovita Fuentes, Filipino soprano who has sung Madam Butterfly from China to Nazi Germany, sang a set of Gustav Mahler's most ivory-turreted Lieder.

Formed iff 1925 by an expatriated Viennese musician named Alexander Lippay, the Manila Symphony at first had hard sledding, often played to audiences of fewer than 100 people. But by the time Pioneer Lippay died in 1939, it was playing to full houses of 2,000, and Lippay's Filipino symphonists all had regular contracts. Today, playing in the Manila Symphony is a full-time job, pays from pesos 30 ($15) to pesos 150 ($75) a month (as much as the starting salary of a government employe). Key men like four-feet-six Concertmaster Ernesto Vallejo have studied in Europe or the U.S. But most of the players, including a bassoonist who learned his instrument in a few days before his first concert, are naturally gifted natives who take to Beethoven like an Igorot to confirmation.* Conductor Zipper, also an Austrian, who fled to the Philippines from a Nazi concentration camp in 1939, arrived in Manila just in time to take up where Conductor Lippay left off.

With the help of his wife, a Viennese dancer named Trudle Dubsky, Zipper introduced Manila to the latest thing in modern ballet. Between seasons he took Manila's orchestra to the mile-high Luzon resort-town of Baguio, where it played symphonies for vacationing Manilans while puzzled Igorots in G strings looked on from the sidelines. Zipper rehearses his men for 90 hours before each concert, sometimes has to teach them how to play their parts. But he claims that his musicians can grasp a trick of technique quicker than many a more thoroughly trained Occidental. Says he: "My first clarinetist could play with any orchestra in the world."

* The late (Episcopal) Bishop Mosher of the Philippines once warned a visiting colleague: "I don't mind so much your confirming the ones I've confirmed, but try not to repeat on the ones both Brent (his predecessor) and I have done."

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