MAKATI CITY, Philippines — The audience rose from their seats before the final chord had faded. At the Proscenium Theater in Circuit Makati, some of the country's most celebrated performers closed "What's It All About," a tribute concert honoring the late American composer Burt Bacharach, with a standing ovation that began before the curtain call had officially started. The concert, held in 2026, brought together artists spanning rock, musical theater, Original Pilipino Music, viral social media, international television, and vocal jazz — all in service of a single, enduring songbook.
According to a report by Kuryente News, the one-night event at the Proscenium in Circuit Makati confirmed what Philippine audiences and performers have quietly known for decades: Bacharach's music did not merely visit these shores. It stayed.
A Composer Whose Songs Outlived Every Era
Burt Bacharach, who passed away in February 2023 at the age of 94, built one of the most durable catalogues in 20th-century popular music. Working most famously with lyricist Hal David and channeled through the voice of Dionne Warwick, he produced songs that occupied a rare and difficult space — simultaneously accessible and harmonically complex, melodically simple on the surface and architecturally intricate beneath.
His songs performed at the Proscenium tribute included "I Say a Little Prayer," "Walk On By," "What the World Needs Now Is Love," "Close to You," "Alfie," "The Look of Love," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," "This Guy's in Love with You," and "Anyone Who Had a Heart."
As Kuryente News described it, what audiences heard as effortless ease was, in fact, music written in odd meters, with key changes that arrived unexpectedly and orchestrations that drew from both Tin Pan Alley and the classical conservatory. Bacharach's defining skill was making the technically demanding sound like a sigh — a quality that made his catalogue a natural fit for performers with the range, discipline, and instinct to honor both the melody and what lay beneath it.
Ryan Cayabyab Anchors a Multi-Generational Lineup
The concert's roster was itself a deliberate statement. To honor a composer whose career stretched across more than six decades, producers assembled a lineup that collectively represented a comparable span of Philippine musical history.
Anchoring the evening was Ryan Cayabyab, National Artist for Music and one of the foundational figures of Original Pilipino Music. A composer-conductor whose own catalogue has shaped generations of OPM performers, Cayabyab's presence framed the concert not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a meeting between two musical traditions — the American popular songbook and the Filipino performing sensibility — that share more in common than the casual listener might expect.
Jett Pangan, frontman of The Dawn and one of the defining voices of Pinoy rock since the late 1980s, brought his extensive musical theater background to the close-mic intimacy that Bacharach's ballads require. Rock vocalists do not always make a clean transition into Bacharach territory, where restraint and phrasing carry as much weight as power. Pangan, according to the Kuryente News account, did more than survive the leap.
Escalante, De Lana, and Vasquez Represent Theater, Digital, and Global Stages
Bituin Escalante, whose musical theater credentials made her among the most naturally suited performers on the bill, delivered readings of "Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "A House Is Not a Home" that moved fluidly from near-whisper to full dramatic voice — the precise dynamic range those compositions were written to demand.
Gigi De Lana, who cultivated a large following through viral live performances with The Gigi Vibes Band, brought a contemporary sensibility to the material. Her interpretations leaned into groove and personality, functioning as a reminder that Bacharach's songs were once chart pop in their own right, not preserved artifacts to be handled with caution.
Sofronio Vasquez, fresh from his historic win on The Voice US — which placed a Filipino voice on American primetime television — completed the soloist lineup by returning home to interpret an American songbook before a Filipino audience. The Kuryente News report noted that the symmetry was not lost on the room.
BAIHANA Brings Vocal Jazz Precision to the Bacharach Catalogue
Among the most structurally compatible acts on the bill was BAIHANA, the all-female vocal jazz trio founded in 2008. The group's name is derived from the Cebuano word for babae, or "girl." Their signature approach — tight, three-part vocal harmony in the tradition of swing-era ensembles like The Andrews Sisters and contemporary vocal groups like The Puppini Sisters — applied to standards and reimagined pop classics — made them a near-ideal vehicle for the Bacharach catalogue.
Bacharach's compositions, built on suspended chords, unexpected harmonic resolutions, and inner melodic lines that move with their own independent logic, reward precisely the kind of vocal group capable of tracking and honoring every voice in the arrangement. BAIHANA's performance drew on that capacity in full.
There was also a personal dimension to the group's appearance. Among BAIHANA's founding members is Krina Cayabyab, daughter of Ryan Cayabyab — meaning the tribute concert, at least for one stretch of the evening, placed father and daughter on the same Makati stage, united by the same songbook. For a concert organized around the theme of music's durability across generations, the image carried a weight that required no elaboration.
Why Bacharach Never Left the Philippine Musical Landscape
The Kuryente News report offered context for why Bacharach's music has maintained such a persistent presence in the Philippines — on radio, in hotel lobbies, across jeepney FM dials, and on wedding setlists for decades. His songs arrived during a long period when American easy-listening pop dominated local airwaves, and they stayed because Filipino vocalists found in them a natural fit.
The Bacharach catalogue, the report noted, rewards qualities that Filipino performers are recognized for: clean tone, extended vocal range, dramatic interpretive instinct, and the discipline to exercise restraint when a song calls for it. Songs like "Close to You," heard in Manila, carry the weight of personal memory for many in the audience — a parent's stereo, a school choir piece, a karaoke standard, a fiesta serenade.
In this sense, "What's It All About" was not introducing an unfamiliar composer to a new audience. It was giving a deeply familiar one a stage — the Proscenium, one of Manila's most architecturally and acoustically distinguished venues — that matched the scale of what had always been there.
Standing Ovation Before the Curtain Call Was Called
By the time the full ensemble gathered for the concert's closing number — all soloists and BAIHANA together — the Proscenium audience had already abandoned the convention of waiting for an official cue. They were standing. They were cheering. The curtain call had not yet been formally signaled.
As Kuryente News described it, a composer born in Kansas City in 1928, who wrote his most enduring work in mid-century New York, was being celebrated on a Makati stage in 2026 by performers whose careers collectively span Pinoy rock, Philippine musical theater, OPM composition, viral digital performance, international broadcast television, and vocal jazz. The geography was different. The generations were different. The language spoken in the lobby was different.
The music that brought them all to the same stage on the same evening was not.
The tribute concert "What's It All About" was held at the Proscenium Theater, Circuit Makati, Makati City, Philippines.
Photo credit: Photo courtesy of Kuryente News