Irma Potenciano at 79: Never too old to sing

MANILA, Philippines - “American Idol? Excuse me!” That’s one of Irma P. E. Potenciano’s quips when we visited her at the UST Conservatory of Music where she teaches voice. We had asked her opinion of talent shows. Those who are not too young should remember that she was the star of the Philippine musical theater for some four decades. A soloist at 15, the star of 13 full-length opera productions and five sarswela, the only Filipino to record with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, a pupil of Pavarotti’s voice teacher himself, Irma arguably was in a position to be arch. 

She could toss a compliment, too, when it’s deserved. For Lea Salonga, who was about 10 years old when she played one of the children in The Sound of Music, Irma had only praise: “Magaling, may disiplina. She has a healthy voice.”

She had played the Mother Abbess in that production of the Broadway show, but today she was in a floral blouse, her hair neatly coiffed and eyebrows perfectly painted and arched. The occasion for the visit was to prep her about upcoming solo recital. On Oct. 1, she will be singing a simple program of art songs, arias, and Filipino classics at the Escaler Hall of the Ateneo de Manila. It will be something of a reunion after 41 years of her absence from the school. Irma headed the music department of the Ateneo Grade School in 1961 to 1969, back in the days when Jim Paredes of the Apo Hiking Society was still years away from defining Pilipino pop and Bembol Roco still had a shock of hair. They would turn out to be showbiz legends in their own right, but back then they were only two boys in neatly pressed uniforms.

Corporal punishment was forbidden: No pinching, no spanking, but she could pull their sleeves. So how did Irma discipline, say, a latecomer? “I made them write. Five hundred times. ‘I will not be late. I will not be late.’ And then when they’re done I tear the paper in front of them. Oh, they were furious. ”

She left the grade school in 1969 because she had developed vocal nodules (“four of them, the size of sesame seeds”). Those developed from her having to teach solfeggio in 13 classes, each with 45 prepubescent boys, from seven in the morning to 12 noon every day. Then there was the Glee Club to attend to, one for each year level. She was all set to star in the school production of Oliver! when her voice disappeared. (Araceli Dans, the art teacher, took over.)

“Too much talking is bad for the voice,” she once said, so it was quite a privilege that she was talking to us, and that’s just a week or so before the recital. 

She does not punish students by making them do lines anymore, but she is still hard on them. When wayward students upset her, she doesn’t yell at them — that would hurt the voice. She throws their books out the door instead.

It’s simply drilled into Irma — the value of discipline. When she was still in her teens and was preparing for a recital, she was told: “No bowling, no dates, no movies, no dancing, no swimming.” That’s what she tells her students now, and that’s the regimen she herself still sticks to. She vocalizes daily when she has a show to prepare for (twice a week on regular days) and makes sure she’s in bed early. (She could, she confesses, stay up all night watching cable TV: The cooking shows, the spy movies, Sex and the City.)

The self-discipline spills over to other aspects of her life. After having her nodules removed in 1972, she followed the doctor’s orders to the letter: Absolutely no singing, and no talking either. She sang her first notes (middle C to E only) after nine months: “It was like giving birth.” The rest of the scale took more time. Two years later she returned to the stage — and Manila audiences were relieved to find her voice back in full and even brighter bloom. She sang a full program of 14 operatic arias, as to say, like the Duchess of Malfi, “I am Irma Potenciano still”— a comeback to rival that of Judy Garland’s at Carnegie Hall.

A diabetic, she sticks religiously to a diet — the same self-discipline at work. Salads, no rice, only nine pieces of grapes, six slices of pineapple, each one only one-inch square, no mangoes (“not in the last 30 years!”). The irony, of course, is that she once ran a catering business and a bakeshop called La Farine at the Dr. Victor R. Potenciano Medical Center (what used to be the Polymedic General Hospital), which she and her late husband had established. La Farine was known for its monay and pan de sal (“My pan de sal weighed 100 grams!”), and Irma’s blueberry torte was the favorite of Manila high society during Christmas. (Last year, the fruitcake was a hit; she made 72 of them. And one thought that there was only one fruitcake going the rounds of the fridge.)

She could compile her recipes for a book, we teased her. That could be her next career.

A new career at her age? The recipes aren’t all hers, and she’s too old now to learn even how to use the computer, she protests.

But not too old to sing, we counter. 

“Now I just sing what I can still sing, but sing them well.”

“Like Vissi d’arte?”

“Not that one, though on a good day I can still reach B-flat.” Then she sings the first few bars of the aria.

When she sings this Friday, Vissi d’arte (I lived for art) could very well be her theme, even though she won’t sing it, plead though we might. But Io son l’umile ancella (I am a humble servant) is on the program, and perhaps the song is more apposite. Irma will turn 79, 20 days after her recital at the Ateneo, 62 of those years as a performing artist. Who else, then, can more rightly make so bold a claim?