Album Notes

Often people say, in the realm of music, the Kundiman is truly one of the most notable contributions to our cultural heritage. Plaintive,sad and tender, it is a love song nurtured in the heart and soul of the Filipino…full of the serene Malayan sentiment of the Filipino tunes that have been hummed and sung through centuries…reechoing the pulsating heartbeat of the brown, fertile earth where the sunbronzed rice-maidens and farmers plant and till the soil, from sun-up to sun-down and when work is dutifully done, with the rice-bins teeming with the golden harvest, sing and dance to their heart’s content.

Conching Rosal sings in her incomparable style and manner twelve of these timeless kundimans…melodic manifestations of the personal sorrow which torments two people in love, from an ode to beautiful, twinkling star, a plea for love and mercy and a hopeless bird with broken wings, to a frivolous affair of the heart, a river-woman and more heartaches of someone who has loved and lost. The dramatic intensity and ardor of Conching Rosal, coupled with the superb direction and arrangement of Leopoldo Silos and his orchestra, do justice to the immortal works of Filipino composers…preserving for posterity the Filipino customs and traditions, his loves and heartaches, not to mention his very own portrait in--- the Kundiman.