Carmen, Sung in Tagalog — Twice Now

Here’s a fact that tends to stop people mid-sentence: one of opera’s biggest, most famous titles — Bizet’s Carmen — has already had a full life in Filipino. Not subtitled. Not surtitled. Sung. In Tagalog. At the FEU Auditorium. In 1956.

Most people assume that’s a typo the first time they hear it. It isn’t. On August 29, 1956, the Manila Symphony Orchestra staged Carmen at Far Eastern University using a Tagalog translation by Manuel Carballo Santiago and Vicente Liwag, under musical director Herbert Zipper (who’d inherited the baton from MSO founder Alexander Lippay) and directed by his wife, Trudl Dubsky-Zipper. In the title role: a young soprano named Conchita “Conching” Rosal, who would go on to become one of the defining voices of Philippine opera.

Seventy years later, almost to the day, the MSO is bringing her back.

“Opera at Kundiman: The Legacy of Maestra Conching Rosal” lands at the FEU Auditorium on August 29 — the fourth concert in the orchestra’s Centennial Season, and a deliberate double celebration: 100 years of the MSO, and what would have been Rosal’s 100th birthday. It’s presented by the Manila Symphony Orchestra Foundation and Standard Insurance, co-presented by EastWest Bank, ACMobility, and BYD, in partnership with FEU — timed, fittingly, to Buwan ng Wika.

Carmen Opera at Kundiman — Maestra Conching Rosal

Who was Conching Rosal, actually

Born in San Jose, Batangas in 1926, Rosal’s origin story is the kind opera likes to tell about itself: she found her voice in a parish church before formal training took her to the UST Conservatory of Music. From there she built a career that ran through Madama Butterfly, Aida, and Ang Kiri, cementing her as one of the country’s leading sopranos from the 1950s through the ’70s.

But the thing that made her genuinely rare wasn’t the opera résumé on its own — it was that she refused to treat kundiman as the lesser art next to it. While plenty of her contemporaries kept the concert stage and the folk tradition in separate boxes, Rosal moved between them like they belonged to the same conversation. Her concerts and recordings did real work in keeping kundiman alive for audiences who might otherwise have let it fade into background nostalgia.

That’s the throughline this program is built on. Alongside selections from Carmen — in Tagalog, again — the evening features kundiman and Filipino vocal works by Nicanor Abelardo, Francisco Santiago, Leopoldo Silos, Constancio de Guzman, and Manuel Velez. Not a tribute concert bolted onto an opera night. One lineage, performed as one lineage.

The voices carrying it

The cast is stacked in a way that should make this an easy sell even for people who think “opera night” isn’t for them:

Rachelle Gerodias-Park (soprano) — first-ever Hall of Famer at the Aliw Awards for Best Female Classical Performer
Michelle Mariposa (mezzo-soprano) — grand finalist, Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition
Arthur Espiritu (tenor) — Metropolitan Opera stage credit, George London Award winner
Byeong-In Park (baritone) — international opera career and vocal mentor

They’ll perform with the Manila Symphony Orchestra, the FEU Chorale, and the FEU Dance Company, conducted by MSO Music Director Maestro Marlon Chen — inside a venue that’s practically a co-star. The FEU Auditorium, inaugurated in 1949 and designed by National Artist for Architecture Pablo Antonio Sr., is an Art Deco landmark in its own right, and it’s the same room where the 1956 Carmen actually happened. FEU turns 98 this year; the building’s held up.

If you’re going

Tickets are on TicketWorld, ranging from ₱1,000 (General Admission B) to ₱5,000 (VIP), with the usual middle tiers in between. Students get 50% off; seniors, PWDs, and diplomats get 20%. There’s also a 20% early-bird rate with the code CONCHINGEB20, but that one expires August 14 at 11:59 PM — so if you’re on the fence, that’s your actual deadline, not the concert date.

For a night built around a woman who spent her career proving Filipino and operatic weren’t opposites, seeing Carmen sung in Tagalog again — in the same room, seventy years later — feels less like nostalgia and more like unfinished business, finally continued.