From the heart: Cecile Licad delights in sharing her music with audiences everywhere

“I feel like a real missionary,” Licad tells Tatler, looking amused perhaps over an image of herself in mind during our conversation. “Sometimes music can be very complicated, so I always aim to simplify it and make it accessible to the people… to have music get into their bones.”

What Licad’s concert at the Metropolitan Theater with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra (PPO) under the baton of Maestro Grzegorz Nowak unravelled for the audience was her very own triumphant story.

Licad debuted at the age of eight at the Philam Life Theater and has shared her talent in nationwide outreach concerts since the age of 14.

Read more: A pas de deux of music and ballet by ABT Studio Company’s “Rising Stars” and Cecile Licad

Although she came from a musical family—with pianist Rosario Buencamino Licad as her mother, the composer Francisco Buencamino as her granduncle, renowned clarinettist and flautist Tiburcio Licad as her grandfather and Gloria Licad Lanot, an MS in Piano degree holder from the Chicago Musical College, as her aunt—she credits her prowess in music to her first formal piano teacher, Rosario Picazo. With her solid foundation and training, Licad was accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 12.

“It’s a very exclusive school where you have to audition personally and they only accept three people from all over the world,” Licad says. “Nobody can just enter because it’s a scholarship. So, it’s only a matter of whether you are good or not. I think I was just lucky.”

In her concert with the PPO, she played Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21. The piece, though published after the composer’s E minor concerto, was actually composed in his years as a student at the Warsaw Conservatory. Licad entered with much expressiveness after the orchestra’s bold and dramatic opening, brimming with passion like in her younger years as a student. What was also striking in her performance was the inflexions in the dynamics, allowing the audience to see her humanness as the piece moved into a more intimate song. At its centre, agitated outbursts contrasted her calm passageworks, then returned into a nocturne-like lyricism. The finale in allegro vivace brings back the orchestra’s opening theme, with rhythms modelled after the mazurka, a lively Polish folk dance, which Licad believes conductor Maestro Nowak is very much familiar with. Youthful and exuberant, the concerto captivated the audience in a blaze of virtuosity. It’s difficult not to see how Licad’s road to global renown paralleled Chopin’s making a mark on the broader European stage in the intricacy of the concerto’s finale.

“The piano is all about touch,” Licad explains. “Some people think that being a classical pianist is merely just banging the shit out of the piano. But actually, it’s all about balance. I play because of the music. I don’t play pieces that are just really for show-off. I like everything to come out as natural as possible—what the piece demands or what I hear at the moment.”

Licad didn’t even expect to win the Leventritt Gold Medal in 1981 and achieve global success at the age of 19. The process, she recalls, was very discreet, where she had to attend private parties in New York to play the piano, unaware that a jury member was present. The coveted award, which was sparingly given for pianists and violinists, was also first announced to her over breakfast.

“The thing is, I don’t know how I was taught,” she laughs, feeling nothing but gratitude to the people who introduced her to classical music before she was catapulted into stardom. The concert at the Metropolitan Theater even carried the moniker Licad earned from The New Yorker, “The Pianist’s Pianist”, as its title.

Read more: Manila Symphony Orchestra’s concert celebrating Italian and Filipino cultures

“All I know is I had a perfect connection with the teacher, and whatever she taught me, I absorbed it and made it better. She was strict, but also very kind. I look at her like an authority, and I think that was important for me,” Licad says. She admits she didn’t have a normal childhood like most kids her age. She remembers her family not being sociable, and so she grew up very introvertedly.

“So mainly, piano was my outlet, and I became good at it,” she adds. Licad recalls how her father would wake her up at 4am to prepare for her practices and lessons. “And I still remember how I hated that. But, you know, it paid off. I learnt to always look for something better, never to stop learning.”

With her father as her source of strength, Licad went on to do the hard work, practising a variety of compositions and periods in classical music at a young age, and even continued to modernise her techniques as she progressed in her career.

“I remember playing in Russia and a guy said, ‘We’re very interested in your piano technique.’ I was like, ‘I’m a mixture, ’” Licad says. For “The Pianist’s Pianist”, it is imperative for her to innovate, not for the sake of just playing the notes well, but for expressing something authentic.

Read more: Aidan Ezra Baracol reveals how rhythm sparked his passion for the piano

In the concert’s second act, Licad performed Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No 2, Op 22 in G minor. Divided into three movements, the piece showcased Licad’s dexterity, speed and power, of which many people regard her highly. It was enthralling to experience Licad in her element and even beyond as she broke from fingering conventions and jived to the rhythm of the song, showcasing the result of her tedious training and flair for entertainment. An exhilarating finish indeed, Licad conveyed to the audiences her current mindspace—embracing the art of imperfection.

“I wouldn’t know how to tell a story verbally, but that’s how I do it… through my hands,” she says. “I don’t even think of structures and whatnots in music when I play. It’s just ingrained in me. I don’t like to listen to recordings, either, even of myself. So when I study and rehearse what I aim to perform next, I start from scratch and allow myself to discover the endless possibilities within the composition,” she shares.

Nowadays, Licad focuses her energies on recording the Anthology of American Piano Music, a collection of some of the most obscure musical treasures from the region, and exploring collaborations with other artists and orchestras. Earlier this year, she delved into the jazz genre as she toured with Wynton Marsalis for the silent film Louis and recorded Scott Joplin’s ragtime pieces, one of which she performed as an encore at the said concert at the Metropolitan Theater.

Performing for the Filipino audience, Licad admits, can be nerve-wracking. “It’s natural for me to feel that because I have to channel an even deeper and clearer something in my soul for my countrymen. Since I was a kid, that nervousness has been instilled in me, perhaps because of my parents. I still feel that I have to give my best,” she says.

As a stirring tribute to her patroness and friend, Licad performed as an encore Chopin’s Étude Op 10, No 3, in E major, also known as Tristesse [Sadness] and was the basis of the popular song No Other Love.

The enduring career of a pianist is something that Licad strives for. “You know, my last piano teacher was 103 when he died. And he was 97 when he played at Carnegie Hall,” she quips.

Hence, she believes there is always room for her to learn something new. “If you start feeling like you’re always the best, if you just put yabang [pride] in the fore, it leads you nowhere. You have to be humble to whatever path you are pursuing and focus on what you like, what you enjoy,” she says, a word of advice to aspiring young musicians.

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