Cecile Licad dazzles Iloilo City—again!

By John Anthony S. Estolloso

Two evenings, two venues. A programme of five composers plus encores. But it seemed so much more when it is Cecile Licad playing on the piano.

Crowds congregated to Molo Church and UPV’s Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage on the evenings of October 6 and 7 to witness, nay, celebrate Cecile Licad’s music. Albeit the lean repertoire – Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Joplin, and Chopin – the pianist never failed to dazzle the appreciative Ilonggo audience with her renowned virtuosity on the piano: never let it be said that good taste in this city was just about gastronomy.

Licad opened the evenings with Beethoven’s fourteenth piano sonata (Moonlight), going through all three movements: a rather blasé opening for the programme. The adagio’s familiar and quiet melody rises above the recurring triplets, with Licad’s rubato ebbing and flowing through the phrases, ‘played with the utmost delicacy and without dampers,’ as advised. The allegretto, delivered with distinct legati, was whimsical without losing the gravitas of the composition; the thundering, racing arpeggios of the presto agitato were a tad hazy but still forcefully, well, agitated, for one so overused and abused by bad playing in social media.

Schumann’s piano works are an acquired taste: never as mainstream as Beethoven’s but as profound as Chopin’s. Delivering the composer’s ‘Carnaval’, Licad plowed through the vignettes of the fairground, breathing life to the 21 short pieces of Schumann’s hodgepodge of scenes and seances. The affairs of the bal masque found new meaning in her nuanced delivery. In Licad’s playing, the characters of the commedia dell’arte were rejuvenated: Harlequin, Pierrot, Pantalon, and Colombine find new iterations of themselves while Schumann’s hommages to his contemporaries were palpable in the intensity of her performance.

The composers of the Romantic age offered pianists the widest range of possibilities with the instrument – and Franz Liszt was the towering genius among them. Licad’s interpretation of his picturesque ‘St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves’ revisits the legend of the saint in a virtuosic display of technicality, as if to paint the miraculous scene with timbre and tone. Licad’s bass scales and arpeggios rumbled with sonorous intensity – at times abrasive to the ear – evoking the rolling, billowing waves; the chords of the sparse melody projected the image of sure steps – or heavy footfalls – of the saint as he crossed his watery path.

Scott Joplin’s ragtime tunes offered a freshly syncopated respite from the sentimentality of the European. Licad’s ‘The Entertainer’ was a tad slow at the offing (at least, as how we recalled it from recordings) without lessening its jocund, convivial personality. But ragtime was never meant to be played fast. Mood matters more, and the flavor exuded by Licad’s playing said all of that; even her strident stomps on the wooden platform for ‘Stop Time Rag’ emphasized the happy, raggedy phrasing of Joplin’s tunes, eccentrically jazzy altogether.

Concluding the evenings was Chopin’s G Minor Ballade, played with an easy familiarity paired well with the dulcet pathos of the composition. It brought back memories of Licad’s 2018 concert when an all-Chopin programme was fare of that evening. One discerns bits and pieces of the composer’s nocturnes, waltzes, and etudes in the rambling piece, punctuated by running scales and hammered chords, their intensity and technical demands not lost to the pianist’s delivery.

Ironically, Licad’s encores seemed to be the most appreciated pieces of the evenings. Old favorites by Chopin or Rachmaninoff were greeted with enthusiastic hums and applause while Buencamino’s ‘Mayon’ was hypnotic in its idyllic and stentorian imagery: a folk tune inundated by glissandos and chords attempts to depict life on farm and field under the impending shadow of a volcano’s violence. It takes a Filipino musician to understand that circumstance – and Licad is the pianist to give the opus depth and meaning, despite the limitations of the instrument. Beyond the programme, her charismatic spontaneity embellished her delivery, charming and reminding the audience that this was the Filipina pianist who shared the spotlight with conductors like Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, and André Previn. The multiple standing ovations of the evenings served to underline that.

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For all the shenanigans of the audience or the inadequacies of the piano those evenings, Cecile Licad was imperturbably brilliant in her delivery. There is a straightforward simplicity and sobriety in her playing yet visibly, technique and years of practice and performance suffuse through her interpretations. And to the music-loving Ilonggos – appreciators and musicians alike – her concerts will always be high-water marks in the art scene of the city.

With that said, dare we look forward to her as soloist in a piano concerto in Iloilo City?

[The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city. Photos are from Ricky Offemaria/Homeless Lens’ official FB page and are used with permission.]