Here she is now, Regine Velasquez
Thirty-six years ago at the Folk Arts Theater, Regine Velasquez—just 20 years old and still with much to prove—opened her first major concert with “Narito Ako.” Quite literally, an announcement, as if to say, “Here I am. This is what my voice can do.” And oh, the things she could do with it.
I have only seen the show on YouTube, from an old TV broadcast rip. The video is so degraded. There are times Velasquez looks like a floating visage. The audio might as well be coming from an empty can. But hiss and distortion be damned, the sound of her voice is unmistakable.
Her timbre is light and girlish; the heft, as we know it, is yet to come. There’s a fearlessness to her singing—or perhaps the word is carefree. She attacks each high note without so much as a thought, a pause, or a sharp inhalation. As the ballad surges into a climax, she unleashes one of its glory notes—“Narito ako na LAAH-gi nang nakatingin”—and it’s so clear and bright and precise, like a laser beam piercing through the air.
If she could sound this formidable in a muffled piece of media, one can only imagine what fell on the ears of the people in that room.
“A freak of nature”
No, I can’t tell you the difference between an F5 and a G5—her most devoted fans versed in vocal pedagogy already have that covered. But what I do know is that her singing is best experienced live.
In Velasquez’s case, her studio versions are almost a disservice. In writing about music events, one phrase I default to—out of habit or plain lack of imagination—is “the voice filled the venue.” A lazy hyperbole. But it ceases to be one when she’s holding the mic.
Many today can hit the same high notes, but no one comes close to matching the seismic force she puts behind them. “Iba ang buga niya,” as fans say. You understand why once her voice resonates every which way—so much so that it feels like the ground is shaking. Her exclamations are claps of thunder; her sustained belts, a tsunami.
Now, these are hyperboles, all right. But Lea Salonga did say that Velasquez is “a freak of nature.”
A reality to live with
An anomaly that she is, the voice remains, after all, a living instrument. Even when she was so hoarse she could barely speak, she could still sing. Or at least we could count on her to sing herself into form, as she did on the second night of her “Twenty” concert. She was under the weather—it showed, especially in her spiels. But lo and behold, after the rasp of the first few songs, it was business as usual.
But what if the husk, the rasp, are no longer just niggling hurdles she could power through, but a reality she has to live with?
The change in her voice’s texture started around the early 2010s. It was subtle, but discernible to sharp-eared listeners. We can only go by what she has told us: that she developed acid reflux, which affected the reliability of her voice; that years’ worth of performing may finally be catching up with her. There’s also this thing called aging.
While her “Silver” concert in 2012—which she had to cut short and restage because of a viral infection—didn’t necessarily mark a drastic physical turning point, it did shake her confidence. And by 2017, Velasquez told me in an interview, “I’m insecure about the fact that my voice isn’t as clean as it once was… I didn’t have such insecurities when I was young.”
A gentler ascent
Thirty-six years later at the Mall of Asia Arena, Velasquez, now 56 years old and with nothing left to prove, opened “Finale,” her last major solo concert, with “Narito Ako.” This time, the song wasn’t so much an announcement of her arrival—or a defiant cry—as it was a revelation of who she has become.
She’s measured in her singing, taking a more deliberate approach to demanding passages that she used to go for in one fell swoop. The rasp is more pronounced. The slightest waver in pitch creeps in once in a while. It needs no sugarcoating: her voice isn’t the same—and she says as much herself.
But despite her anxiety, we see an icon still willing to explore the colors of her voice and experiment with arrangements that make the most of its changing capacity. Still bold enough to deliver varied, three-hour setlists across three consecutive nights.
“Narito Ako,” in parts, felt like a kundiman that ends not with triumph, but with wistfulness. “Sana Maulit Muli,” once an emphatic plea, has turned into a yearning lament. In “What Kind of Fool Am I?”—one of her signature showstoppers—the ascent is gentler, a little nerve-wracking at times, but she took us to the stratosphere just the same.
A voice still hers
Some might have been left wanting. But if you think about it, there’s nothing conservative about this show at all. It’s just that Velasquez has set the bar so high for herself that anything less feels like a compromise. She has consistently made the extraordinary seem ordinary for so long that we’re only now beginning to appreciate anew just how superhuman it all was.
That’s why it was almost jarring to hear her apologize in advance that she might “butcher” “And I Am Telling You.” And yet, she still had the gumption to perform it with nothing but piano accompaniment. Like a ballerina unwrapping her feet to reveal the bruises beneath the beauty. As if to say, “Here I am. This is what my voice can do now.”
What a gift it was to see an artist as generous at her most vulnerable as she was at her most invincible. “I show up because you keep showing up,” she says.
And what a privilege it must be—after decades of using that instrument in the service of her art, of soaring high—for the Songbird to find a safe space where she can land, amid the faithful who would be there even if only to breathe the same air. “Kahit magkuwentuhan lang kami,” a fan quips.
And so Velasquez sings on, her voice weathered with time, but still hers—and everyone else’s who has been touched by it.
