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by Nina Beckwith FEATURED UCSF ARTIST | NINA'S ARTS NOTES 1st appeared 13 July 1998 Florante Aguilar -- The Spirit Soars It's true that at UCSF artists are everywhere. Even in the august premises of the Chancellor's Office, the courteous young man who greets you turns out to be a staff administrative analyst who is also a skilled musician, one whose adventurous career was salvaged by UCSF specialists.
Like many other young Filipinos in l986 and '87, Aguilar felt he would be thrown off course by his country's political upheavals unless he could leave and follow his studies in relative peace, ideally with the well-known guitar master Manuel Barrueco at the Manhattan School of Music. Aguilar applied and was accepted but asked to fly over and audition personally, which he did and was awarded a partial scholarship. Instead of Barrueco, he studied with Sharon Isbin, another prominent artist and, he says, "a great musician and a wonderful teacher. I arrived with $l00 in my pocket but I scraped along with various jobs, living on rice and soy sauce." After a year in New York, Aguilar saw a notice that the Buffalo Guitar Quartet had lost a player and was looking for a substitute. Aguilar applied, auditioned, and two weeks later he was shufflin' off to Buffalo, whose subzero winters are the most extreme contrast to the Philippines' tropical heat that could be imagined. The Buffalo Guitar Quartet are known as champions of new music. This was the big time and Aguilar had to practice mightily to learn and perform many contemporary and fiendishly difficult compositions. After just four months, he was able to take part in the group's CD recording, "New Music for Four Guitars," on New World Records. Two years later, he had to stop playing because of disability in his left hand. His search for help took him to clinics and specialists in New York, Cleveland, Washington, and elsewhere before he heard about the UCSF Health Program for Performing Artists and called its founder and director, the late Peter Ostwald. Ostwald, who died in l996, was a psychiatrist at Langley Porter for 30 years and a violinist who was also a pioneer in the comparatively new subspecialty of performing arts medicine. Ostwald referred Aguilar to Frank Wilson, a UCSF neurologist who has a particular interest in problems of the hand. After surgery at UCSF for a painful nerve impingement, Aguilar had to embark on a protracted course of physical therapy, working with Nancy Byl, head of the Graduate Program in PT, and mainly with therapist Rita Arriaga ("she helped me tremendously and I can't thank her enough," he says) so he decided that the logical thing would be to stay here and try to get a job at UCSF. Only a year and a half later, Aguilar had regained use of his hand and re-acquired a performing level which allowed him to give a recital in the Lange Room and to play the exciting Aranjuez Concerto by Joaquin Rodriguez with the UCSF Symphony. Also, he was able to finish his degree requirements at the SF Conservatory of Music. Like that of many musicians, Aguilar's career partakes of both ecstasy and agony. His incapacity returned and last year he had major surgery to replace some fragmented cervical discs. Once more he is in physical therapy and he is beginning to play the guitar again but not for eight or ten hours a day as he used to. "If you have a dream, a passion, I've learned that there is such a thing a holding on too tightly," he says. "This is what happens when the spirit soars ahead of the body." Aguilar is working, too, on reinforcing overall body strength and relearning his playing technique to avoid the strains that contributed to his troubles. Before long he hopes to be back in full form. All in all, he feels that UCSF is the best place he could be, not only for physical care but also "because there are so many artists here, and so much going on in the arts." At Home and Abroad Commemorating the Centennial of the Philippine Declaration of Independence, the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park has organized the first major US exhibition devoted to contemporary Filipino Art. On view through August 30 are over 50 works including paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, fabric works, and installations. The exhibition's title, "At Home and Abroad" reflects the fact that the 20 artists represented live all over the world, in the Philippines, other parts of Asia, in Australia, North America, and Europe. With this show, the Asian aims to reach out to the large Filipino community in the Bay Area with an exploration through art of the rich, though often buried, legacies of the ancient peoples of the islands and the changes that occurred through colonization and the role of the Church. Viewers will find that the contemporary art that is being made in the Philippines and by Filipinos around the world is strong and complex. A number of the artists born in the l960s and l970s (often called the "Martial Law Babies" because they came of age after the l972 crackdown ordered by then-President Ferdinand Marcos) spent their youth in the protest movement and their art continues to focus on politics, popular culture, and urban reality, while artists who live abroad often work in diverse visual languages embodying their mixed feelings of "longing and belonging." In connection with this show, on Saturday, August 8 at 2 p.m., the Asian will host a poetry reading by Jaime Jacinto, born in Manila and raised in the Richmond District, from his collection Heaven is Just Another Country. And every Sunday at 1 p.m., families with young children may gather to hear adventures, legends, and myths brought to life by Asian Art Museum storytellers. A convenient lunchhour hop from the Parnassus campus, the Asian in Golden Gate Park is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. with extended evening hours until 8:45 p.m. on the first Wednesday of each month. Admission is free for children under 12, $4 for kids, $7 for adults. Exhibition hotline is 379-8801; website www.asianart.org * * * * * G&S and the Pirates The Lamplighters are one of the important reasons the Bay Area is such a rewarding place for lovers of musical theater. The group was founded in l952 and has put on two seasons a year ever since to the delight of audiences of all ages because the Lamplighters are specialists in performing the witty, fast-moving, and brightly comic operettas of W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. If you don't know them, you and your family are in for an exceptional treat because the Lamplighters are going to perform one of the funniest and most popular of these operettas, The Pirates of Penzance, from July 24 to August 3, in the ideal setting of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, whose sightlines and acoustics are both very good. Those of us who were raised on G&S wouldn't miss a Lamplighters show for all the world. In his day, Sullivan, who died in l900, was considered England's greatest composer: he was knighted in recognition of his large output of serious works and church music, including the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers." But his greatest, even more enduring fame comes from the marches, ditties, dances, and melodies of all kinds he wrote to the wickedly clever lyrics of William S. Gilbert, who was not knighted but who created a theatrical tradition carried on by Cole Porter, Kaufman and Hart, Stephen Sondheim and every musical and cabaret act that pokes fun at the powerful and pompous. Pirates was an immediate hit, premiered in New York and simultaneously in England as a precaution against....piracy, so popular were G&S operettas such as Pinafore that unauthorized scores and performances had proliferated. At Yerba Buena you'll see a fine production. The Lamplighters' singers are all volunteers, very talented ones: they do it for love and they know how to make you understand every word, in English of course. Director is Russell Blackwood and conductor is Monroe Kanouse. This is definitely that rare occasion: a show for the whole family. Yerba Buena Theater is at 700 Howard Street at Third, not far from BART and several MUNI lines. Tickets are $24-$30; seniors and youth $20-$26. Phone 978-2787. |
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Florante Aguilar came to the
US ten years ago from the Philippines. He had started at age ten playing native Filipino
stringed instruments such as octavinas and bandurias. Then he happened to see two of the
world's most accomplished guitar players, Julian Bream and John Williams, and fell in love
with the classical six-stringed folk guitar. Aguilar pursued his studies and while at the
University of the Philippines he joined a guitar quartet, playing concerts and touring
abroad.