Pianist Cecile Licad received one of classical music’s most prestigious prizes for a rising performer, the Leventritt Award, in 1980, launching an international performing career that followed.
Born in Manila on May 11, 1961, she grew up in a musically active household; her uncle Francisco Buencamino was a respected composer and pianist. Piano instruction began with her mother when she was three, yet she quickly advanced beyond that level and was taken by her father—classical broadcasts filling the car—to study with leading Filipino pedagogue Rosario Picazo. At seven she made her first appearance with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. Family encouragement sometimes involved incentives such as cigarettes to encourage practice, and Licad began smoking at age eleven. Filipino leader Ferdinand Marcos noticed her talent and arranged government assistance for studies in the United States. At twelve she played for a stunned Rudolf Serkin in Philadelphia; he remarked that at her age he “could not touch what she is doing.” She enrolled at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, working with Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Seymour Lipkin, and in 1977 Serkin accepted her as his student. The 1980 Leventritt victory, an honor then notable because, like the MacArthur Foundation “genius grants,” nominees were not informed in advance that they were under consideration, marked the start of an elevated trajectory. Licad has performed with nearly every major American orchestra, among them the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra, as well as ensembles overseas. Rudolf Serkin’s son Peter also championed her work, collaborating in duo-piano repertoire both live and on recordings. An avid chamber-music participant, she has appeared at Vermont’s Marlboro Festival and at New York’s Lincoln Center alongside violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Her core repertoire spans the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth. She has maintained regular tours of her native Philippines.
During the 1980s and 1990s she recorded for CBS and MusicMasters. When the latter label ceased operations in 1999, her recording activity slowed, yet she rebounded the next year with a widely noticed album of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s music. Subsequent releases have appeared on Hyperion, Newton Classics, and Danacord. In the late 2010s much of her focus went into the multi-volume “Anthology of American Piano Music” project; its fourth installment, centered on George Gershwin, was issued in 2020.
