What an incredible way to close out the year. My family and I watched Natividad et Familia, the Christmas concert of the UST Guitar Department which was held at Manila Pianos. This show featured faculty, students, and alumni and my nephew was one of the performers. The theme, as you can guess from the title of the concert, is about celebrating Christmas with family so almost everyone in the audience were family and friends of the performers. In fact, each member of the faculty had a duet performance with one of their family members.
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| Natividad et Familia Christmas concert of the UST Guitar Department |
The repertoire was wonderful. It featured a great mix of classical, contemporary, pop, and even rock music (I thought it was cool that they performed a guitar ensemble version of Metallica's Fade to Black). Naturally, the performers also played some Christmas songs.
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| Manila Pianos |
My nephew performed three times that evening. First, he performed Sleigh Ride together with the other students of Assistant Professor Mesa. Next, he performed Attic for Nine Guitars by Andrew York with the Sibol Guitar Octet of which he is part. Since the octet only includes 8 people, Assistant Professor Mesa joined them. Finally, he joined the full ensemble that performed a special arrangement of Shchedryk (the English and more internationally known name of this is Carol of the Bells). This is one of my favorite Christmas songs so it was wonderful to see and hear the UST Guitar Department perform it to wrap up a fantastically musical and Christmassy evening.
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| The full ensemble |
The concert started at 6pm and it lasted a little more than 2 1/2 hours (including intermission). With the photo taking and socializing that happened afterwards, we left Mania Pianos at around 9pm. At this point, we still hadn't had dinner so the problem now was that there wouldn't be a lot of places that were still open since many restaurants close at 10pm. I then remembered that Mendokoro in Salcedo Village in Makati is open until 11pm. We decided to have dinner there.
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| Family dinner at Mendokoro |
Thankfully, when we arrived at 930pm, Mendokoro didn't have a lot of diners anymore so there were more than enough seats for all of us. I've always wanted to take my family to my favorite ramen place in Metro Manila, especially since they all enjoy Japanese food (including my nephew who had just performed) so I'm happy we celebrated my nephew's successful concert performance here. It truly was a great way to close out 2025.
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