Anthology of American Piano Music, Vol. 3

Cecile Licad

Called ‘a pianist’s pianist’ by The New Yorker, Cecile Licad’s artistry is a blend of daring musical instinct and superb training. Her playing displays a combination of qualities seldom found in the musical world of today: musical passion, artistic integrity, spontaneity, and a highly developed skill of amalgamating sometimes unusual, rarely-played compositions into extremely impressive recital programmes.
Born in Manila, she had her first piano lessons with her mother when she was three years old. At the age of seven she made her first public appearance, playing the solo part of a Beethoven concerto. When she was 12, she moved to the United States where her natural talent was honed at the Curtis Institute of Music by three of the greatest performer/pedagogues of our time: Rudolf Serkin, Seymour Lipkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. This was followed by five more years of private studies with Rudolf Serkin.
She made her professional debut at the age of 19 at the Tanglewood Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa. The following year she won the prestigious Leventritt Gold Medal, one of the youngest musicians ever to do so. Since then, Cecile Licad has been giving solo recitals all over the world and has appeared as soloist with numerous American, European, and Asian orchestras. She has performed with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, André Previn, Mstislav Rostropovich, Sir George Solti, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Pinchas Zukerman. Among her most outstanding recordings are Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Claudio Abbado and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the second piano concertos of Chopin and Saint-Saëns with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under André Previn, a recording that was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque. In collaboration with the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg she recorded violin sonatas by Brahms and Franck, and in the last few years has become a frequent partner of cellist Alban Gerhardt, with whom she recently recorded the cello sonatas by Gabriel Fauré. Gerhardt said of her: ‘She belongs to those rare artists who deal with music in a way as it has never been dealt with before. The way how she performs Chopin’s Etudes is phenomenal – there is so much energy, passion, ecstatic power, genius…. I have always been waiting for someone to come and play these works in a way as she now plays them.’
Licad’s large repertoire as an orchestral soloist spans everything from the classical concertos of Mozart and Beethoven to the romantic literature of Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Rachmaninoff, and on to the twentieth century with works by Ravel, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartók, and Gershwin.
While her solo repertoire is even broader, she has recently developed a keen interest in classical piano music by American composers. Her 2003 Naxos release of solo works by Louis Moreau Gottschalk has rightfully been hailed as a landmark recording of music by this composer. In August 2010, it was Cecile Licad (playing Gottschalk) and Wynton Marsalis (with his 10-piece jazz ensemble) who provided the live accompaniment for the premieres in five American cities of the contemporary silent movie Louis, an homage to Louis Armstrong by director Dan Pritzker. Since then, Cecile has begun to include an increasing number of works by American composers in her recent recitals in major American cities (New York, Philadelphia, Portland, etc.) as well as in renowned music festivals (Miami and Husum, Germany). Her performances provided vivid testimony of her passion for these neglected American masterworks.