Biography of Cecile Licad

One of the most outstanding concert artists in the world is pianist Cecile Licad. Born in
the Philippines, Licad began her studies on piano at the age of 3 with her mother and
made her public debut in Manila at the tender age of 7. At 14, Licad played for pianist
Rudolf Serkin, who upon hearing her exclaimed "when I was her age, I could not touch
what she is doing." Licad was soon packed off to the Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia, where she studied with Serkin, Seymour Lipkin, and Mieczyslaw
Horszowski. In 1980 Licad was awarded the prestigious Leventritt Award, even though
she hadn't competed for it and the competition itself had been dormant for several years.

Her recording career began promisingly enough, with Licad's early CBS recordings of the
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 2 invading
the Billboard classical charts. After her work with CBS ended in 1989 with a splendid
album of Schumann's piano music, she recorded some chamber music with Nadja
Salerno-Sonnenberg for EMI, also appearing with the latter at Lincoln Center. In the
mid-'90s Licad recorded two discs of Chopin and Ravel for the MusicMasters label that
represented some of her best recordings. But even as Licad was winning unqualified
raves for her work in the concert hall, changing economics in the classical music market
sank MusicMasters, taking her recordings along with it.

In 2003 Licad made a stunning comeback in the record market with a magnificent
recording of piano music by American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk for the Naxos
label. All along Licad has continued to tour and give concerts even as competition among
soloists for a shrinking number of engagements is growing tighter by each season. One
good example of Licad's toughness, however, is that in 2003 she was playing an outreach
concert in Tuguegarao City, in the northern province of Philippines, and decided to take a
side trip to view the Banaue rice fields. Licad and her company were trapped by a series
of mud slides; however, she managed to slog through a couple of miles of knee-deep mud
in order to make it to a helicopter, just in time to catch her 8 a.m. flight from Manila to
her next engagement in Madison, WI.

About a Licad concert, a Washington Post reviewer once wrote "every sound she made
was beautiful, every note and phrase the result of intellect warmed by emotion." Indeed,
Licad is so good that she makes you forget the composer and luxuriate in the warmth and
deep feeling elicited by her playing alone -- she could probably bring one to tears with a
Czerny etude. Anyone who is foolish enough to stipulate that all the greatest concert
artists belong to the past and that "they just don't make them like that anymore" has never
heard Cecile Licad play. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide