Licad is a phenomenon. Period.
Cecile Licad’s last Philippine performance, to mark her 40th year as a concert pianist and the 125th brith anniversary of her illustrious ancestor, composer Francisco Buencamino, is still the talk of the town after nearly a month. The last performance of the Leventritt awardee has also provoked criticism from learned sectors, who are of course entitled to their own opinion. Arguably, Licad is the best Filipino pianist. There can be no doubt that she is a musical phenomenon the world over and that she is the most celebrated of Filipino pianists, gifted with a formidable stage presence and with a talent that should be more than enough to convince intelligent agnostics that there is a God.
Her playing has provoked many remarks, though, ranging from “sublime,” “beautiful,” “moving to tears,” “powerful,” “limpid articulation and phrasing” to “self-indulgent,” “inconsistent,” “inappropriate,” “maudlin” and “patchy.” All these adjectives make up the phenomenon that is the Manila-born Cecile Licad, who will forever be present in the annals not only of our nation’s cultural history, but that of the world whose stages she has already conquered.
She wasn’t born to satisfy every audience, but she is destined to make a powerful, lasting, thought-provoking statement with each of her performances. And her full-house performance last March 28 at the CCP was no exception.
Despite the lack of sonorous sound, the PPO under the baton of the celebrated Oscar Yatco, whose effortless and graceful style, was a dignified accomplice to the latest Licad feat, which indeed was a showcase of seasoned artistic license. Licad indeed took some liberties, especially with the Beethoven. Purists may not like it, but it was a demonstration of how an established artist appropriated a work as her own.
Only a seasoned, learned, experienced, sincere (and therefore, legitimate) interpreter could make a work his or her own. It is not only a case of being a spokesman of Beethoven, for his work and that of any other creator, is no longer his own and has consequences beyond his control. Licad, always working within the framework of the artistic text, also played for herself when she played Beethoven, making Beethoven a richer, closer and living artistic discourse for us separated by milieu and context.
That night, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Opus 19 (1788-1798), with Licad’s lyricism that truly made the piano sing, had charming echoes of Haydn and Mozart. The abundance of themes was there. So too were the double expositions, the somewhat Romantic heaviness. Beethoven was there and so was Cecile Licad, who not only returned to the original moment of the piece’s creation but recreated it for the audience that night, claiming to be the great master’s co-creator, thus enriching the horizons of the master’s original projection.
The awaited moment came with the Rach 2. This writer has a recording of Licad playing this same concerto in the mid-1980s under the baton of the charismatic Italian conductor Claudio Abbado. Frankly, to this writer’s mind, that recording was not one of Licad’s best. The rhythm and execution then was heavy, stilted, but still there was already a message. It was a prelude of how Licad would later on continue to be dominated by Rach 2, even to that still controversial performance at the CCP with R. Barbieri. But at that humid March evening, Licad showed how her Rach has grown or how she has grown into Rach 2, with truly a solid, powerful and moving performance, worth recording as a parameter for future performances of this celebrated piano concerto.
Licad, a powerful personality, allowed her domineering self to be enslaved by the music (with her signature arm raising and head movements that cover her face with her hair, which many have dismissed as sheer self-indulgence), never forgetting she was still part of an ensemble as she accompanied the orchestra or as the orchestra accompanied her (something common to both Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff). And the result was ecstatic. True, there were moments of apparently contrived elegance, somewhat exaggerated syncopations, rubatos. But all throughout there were palpitant entrances that gradually built up to a discourse, wherein Rachmaninoff became Licad and Licad became Rachmaninoff. Only the ontological distance preserved the difference between them.
Licad did not try to dominate. She was dominated by the sheer beauty, with the PPO playing as accomplice. Yet she came out, through her instrument and in the company of Yatco and the orchestra, as the sacrament of the beauty forever consigned in the score. Tchaikovsky’s shadow was there. Rachmaninoff was omnipresent. Yet it was Licad who spoke, doing justice to the immortal Russian composer and pianist, and being the slave of the lush undulant melodies, especially towards the staccato climax. She was the servant of the composer and her service became its own reward as the mystical moment culminated in the crowd-rousing conclusion.
This writer abstains from commenting on the anti-climatic four encores which were showcases of Licad’s already established wizardy and powerful rapport with her audience. It was a night of honor also for the recently-departed Basilio Manalo, himself a renowned violinist and conductor, to whom Yatco dedicated that evening’s performance of Beethoven’s Overture To Egmont, Op.84.
Licad’s musical discourse that evening was not marked by consistencies. They were marked by dynamical outbursts, novelties which indeed revealed mysterious rhythms, intuitively assimilated but intelligently projected, tempered by seasoned taste of a formidable medium, who did not just take risks but made Beethoven and Rachmaninoff’s discourse her very own, making them speak through her with Licad speaking through them. Licad’s own horizon, and that of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, together with Kreiseler, Gottschalk and Buencamino, expanded that evening, making them more accessible, vivid, revealing legitimate open spaces and projections, always in search of sublimity.
Licad is a phenomenon. Period. She is already a living legend. The word “legend” comes from the Latin legere, to read. Whatever options she may take in the configuration of her musical discourse, will be read and made the subject of comment even by the most undiscriminating audiences. Licad’s reading will always be discussed yet they will always be legitimate, for they are the fruits of a long, sincere, seasoned, learned and experienced search which are the hallmarks of what we all deem to be “art.”
