Cecile Licad talks about Chopin, Bartók & clam spaghetti
This Filipino woman who lives in New York cooks adobo, eats rice like crazy, loves patis and suka, even ordering them online. She takes one-hour walks on most days to her favorite ramen place. She hunts for good vintage clothes in thrift shops. She makes clam spaghetti vongole to entice her son, who works in a hotel, to visit her in the apartment. She likes Netflix. She likes horror and suspense movies, even giddily recalling a time in California when she chanced upon a screening of Fatal Attraction, thinking it was a romance flick. She spends days at home in her pajamas because she admits to not being very sociable. The neighbors a floor below complain of the thunderous sounds from her piano, while the janitor secretly dances to the music from behind her apartment door.
These are days in the life of an ordinary Filipina. In a way, yes, but she happens to be world-class pianist Cecile Licad, once dubbed by The New Yorker as a “pianist’s pianist.” And Cecile Licad plays piano the only way Cecile Licad can: seemingly possessed by the gods of the keys, glissandoing out the body and into a cloud of manic nirvana. A mighty blur of fingers. In a zone.
“Somebody was talking to me about Buddhism a couple of days ago — and it’s almost similar,” recalls Cecile. When playing music, she adds, she wants to get lost in the moment. “And go in a sort of time-space warp. I’m alone most of the time, so I am in touch with this something that nobody can take away.”
And what that something is, it probably is this: to take one look at the labyrinth of ivories and know right away where the right paths and passages are.
‘Do I ever compose my own music? Only when I get lost in a piece (laughs). There was this passage I was practicing so much, but when the part came, I totally spaced out. I panicked, so I made stuff up. But when I listened to the live recording, I went, “Hmm… that’s interesting.”’
Licad started playing the piano as a child, her mom Rosario being her first teacher. “Actually, I can’t even remember the exact age — three or four years old — because I was so young when I started. All I know is it gave me a way in which I could hide — hide from the world.”
She admits she was shy as a kid, hardly talked. “Even now, it is hard to get answers from me. I am not always accurate in what I say.” Because (we can offer as a conjecture) she is more articulate when playing a prelude or a nocturne, when letting her soul speak.
“Looking back, I never thought I had a bad childhood. It was just not normal. I’d be waking up at 4 in the morning. I played piano for two hours before I went to school, and then played again when I got home… until it got dark, until around 10 in the evening. That happened every day of my life — and I haven’t stopped. It has gone into my system. That was what I did and that’s what I’ll always do.”
In the old Licad house, patriarch Jesus would string up his reel-to-reel tapes, set them in a loop, and make the young Cecile listen to incredible recordings of the great pianists: Horowitz, Rubinstein, and Rudolf Serkin. Serkin would later on become one of Cecile’s teachers at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia when Licad moved to the States at the age of 11 to study music.
“When I played for Serkin, I was very scared. I was in awe of this piano legend. At (a school performance where Serkin was one of the jurors), I played a Mozart sonata and I totally screwed up one passage. I was 13! I went home to my mother and was in tears — ‘I’m going to get kicked out of the school!’”
The next morning, Serkin sought out Licad to talk to her. The legendary concert pianist surprised the young student with these words: “When you played, you brought my wife to tears.”
It was a big lesson for Cecile. “In the Philippines, we’d go, ‘Oh, she made a mistake!’ This is not what’s important. What’s important is the message that a musician can get across. It’s a huge lesson for me at a very young age. It’s not about trying to do your best, it’s about being who you are.”
And Cecile has continuously defined who she is on the world stage. She has appeared with orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Children’s Orchestra, and the orchestras of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Tucson and Vancouver. In Europe she has played with the London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra, and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; in Asia, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic, and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, as well as our very own Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. She has played under the baton of conductors like Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Eugene Ormandy, Sir George Solti, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kurt Masur and Sir Andre Previn.
Most recently she collaborated with the Wynton Marsalis Jazz Septet, performing the music of New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk to accompany a silent film tribute to jazz icon Louis Armstrong. Louis premiered at Chicago’s Symphony Center with repeat performances at London’s Barbican Hall. It was followed with a live recording at Abbey Road studio, one of the meccas of Beatlemania.
Cecile recalls the sessions at Abbey Road. The piano in which Paul McCartney banged out Lady
Madonna was ensconced in one of the rooms, the ghost of John Lennon’s voice hanging heavily in the air. As Marsalis’ gang rehearsed, in walked the Filipino pianist. Cecile played with so much fire and energy that— according to Marsalis himself — the jazz musicians would later on describe her “a classical musician with a jazz spirit.”
She says, “I liked that! That’s what I do. I want to not stay stuck in a box. Before I perform a piece, I am not sure how I will play it. It’s almost improvisational, too — although in terms of emotion, sound, color… something.”
Cecile was recently in Manila — bringing with her a nine-foot Hamburg Steinway piano courtesy of manager and Pro Piano president Ricard de la Rosa — to perform before PNoy, Obama and the rest of the dignitaries at the APEC welcome dinner. In the days leading to the gig, she stayed at the house of Rustan’s chairman and CEO Nedy Tantoco, a longtime fan and patron, to rehearse. (“Nedy’s amazing,” says Cecile. “She has been very supportive.”)
Licad shares, “I played a Chopin revolutionary etude. They needed something short and nationalistic in flavor. And it has this deep passionate feeling.”
Licad is slated to perform a one- night- only fundraising concert for the benefit of the Philippine-Italian Association (PIA) Endowment Fund and the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra’s tour of the United States of America in June of 2016, a historic first-ever tour by a Filipino orchestra to the US. Cecile’s Manila concert will be on Jan. 27, 2016 at 8 p.m. at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Main Theater. The concert is co-sponsored by the Rustan Group of Companies and the CCP.
Earlier this year, Licad performed at the 40th anniversary of the Santuario de San Antonio Church in Forbes Park, opting to play a challenging, polarizing Bartók composition. “I want to open people’s ears and minds to new stuff. All of us in this world have this curiosity, but sometimes we shut ourselves off, preferring to hear the classical ‘hits’ instead. We are in this world to explore.”
Explore the world and at the same time treasure one’s roots — this is Licad’s philosophy.
“Even if I have lived in the US for a long time, I still am Filipino. It is ingrained. When I play music, I try to get the soul out of it. And it comes out as Filipino. I can’t erase it. I don’t want to erase it. That’s what makes me stand out.”
Cecile Licad even serves sinigang to guests in her apartment in NYC. “I try to make the best sinigang. I use the right ingredients such as real tamarind. I’m a perfectionist that way ( laughs).” Surely that dish is the most classical-tasting sinigang in Cecile Licad’s own piece of New York.
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