Two things I remember about going to Bacolod. Setting foot on an ancestral house where Peque Gallaga shot “Oro, Plata, Mata” and discovering the Gaston House (now a museum) in Silay City. That house saw the birth of the country’s first mezzo soprano of consequence.
Silay City-born mezzo soprano Conchita Gaston sang Bizet’s Carmen at the New York City Opera in December 1950, the first Filipino to sing the role. Of Gaston’s portrayal of Carmen in the 1950s, American critic-musicologist Deems Taylor wrote, “There may be a better Carmen than Conchita Gaston, but I haven’t heard one yet.”
A year after her 1955 recital at the Town Hall in New York, Gaston met the then very young conductor Leonard Bernstein who found her good enough to be pitted with Beverly Sills in Der Rosenkavalier duet, “The Presentation of the Rose,” at the Carnegie Hall.
The critics had reservations about Bernstein’s conducting and the somewhat hollow tones of Sills. They reserved the best word for the Filipina mezzo who, they noted, was a “commendable Octavian, singing with warm, resonant tones.”
A Columbia artist like Cecile Licad when she was just starting, Gaston basked in the company of her contemporaries during the 1955-56 season, namely, sopranos Leontyne Price and Renata Tebaldi and tenors Jussi Bjoerling and Richard Tucker. The only other mezzo in the Columbia line-up was Jennie Tourel, an admirer of Filipina soprano Evelyn Mandac and a good friend of Bernstein.
Gaston’s second encounter with Bernstein was when she was chosen to sing the role of Jocasta in the Stravinsky opera oratorio, Oedipus Rex. This piece had Alistair Cooke as narrator. The rave reviews for Gaston were unanimous.
The New York Times wrote, “Conchita Gaston, flamboyantly gowned in orange, looked and acted like a queen and sang with telling effect.”
New York Herald Tribune said: “Conchita Gaston sang Jocasta’s aria with spine-tingling dramatic force and expression.”
Some seven years after she was diagnosed with cancer, she had a fund-raising concert at the CCP to launch the Conchita Gaston Cancer Foundation in 1981. In the audience was Romanian diva Nelly Miricioiu who couldn’t believe that the woman singing a fiery “Habanera” was cancer-stricken.
La Gaston first sang the role at the CCP in the early ’70s. At the time, pianist Raul Sunico was her accompanying artist. Sunico remembered that Carmen: “The late Conchita Gaston looked every inch a gypsy in that role, and I remember her fine mezzo voice. On top of that, she was a real good actress.”
Atlanta-based ballerina Maiqui Gaston Mañosa, had fond recollections of her aunt. She was still very young when she heard her aunt’s first Carmen at the CCP.
The ballerina said the Gastons of Negros are also famous for their tempers, but she did not see her Aunt Conchita show it even once.
“She was always smiling, and I have yet to see her getting upset by one thing or the other.”
The truth is Gaston excelled not just as Carmen but in other roles as well. She was Cherubino in the Belgium production of Marriage of Figaro, Azucena in a German production of Il Trovatore, Amneris in Aida, Eboli in Don Carlo, Konchakovsna in Stravinsky’s Prince Igor, among others.
Gaston gave her last performance on Dec. 5, 1983 at the golden jubilee of the Diocese of Bacolod. She was not well by then.
An account of that last performance ran: “When she got to ‘Ave Maria,’ she missed the words. The audience wept. She once intimated to a sister ‘The moment I cannot sing, I’ll die.’” Gaston died on June 11, 1984.
Describing the singer, an admirer said, “Conchita Gaston had a beautiful voice. Most importantly, she had a beautiful heart.”