A week after she shared two nights of standing ovation with Lea Salonga and Lisa Macuja-Elizalde at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, pianist Cecile Licad got the same euphoric response for her solo recital at the Festival Miami in Florida, USA, last Oct. 20.
Although already used to such acclaim, Licad said she was stunned as she was not sure her unusual program would get the approval it deserved.
Her program consisted of Gottschalk’s “Souvenirs d’Andalousie,” “Manchega,” Op. 38; and Grand Scherzo, Op. 57; along with works of relatively unpopular American composers such as William Mason, Leo Ornstein and Edward MacDowell.
The only non-American pieces in the program were Busoni’s “American Indian Diary” and Cecile Chaminade’s Sonata in C Minor, Op. 21.
Asked by a Miami music writer what French composer Cecile Chaminade was doing in an all-American program, the pianist quipped: “Because we have the same name.”
American critic Richard Yates wrote Licad’s “venturesome” program was delivered with deep-seated intensity. He added Licad revealing her whimsical persona in MacDowell’s “Woodland Sketches.”
In Busoni’s “American Indian Diary,” Licad, according to Yates, used heavy pedaling, emphasizing the restless, blurred imagery in the music. “The mixture of brusque, metallic low sounds with Chopin-like arabesques created a fantastic sound world—anything but the typical ‘folk music’ setting.”
Mason’s “Silver Spring,” Op. 6, the critic wrote, was an exquisite technical showpiece for Licad, emphasizing the intricacy of the hand-over-hand passages, and her playing in the extensive upper reaches of the instrument was equally polished.
The critic concluded that Licad’s performance of Ornstein’s Piano Sonata No. 4 (1918) was undoubtedly the highlight of the afternoon.
Observed Yates: “Ornstein, famous in the early 20th century for character works such as ‘Wild Men’s Dance’ and ‘Suicide in an Airplane,’ had a reputation of overreaching the threshold for acceptable limits of performance. This fierceness, on the verge of savagery, was precisely what made him immensely popular. The sheer volume of sound, as a mammoth enlargement of Debussyian harmonic language and fin-de-siècle chromaticism, is what gives works like the Fourth Sonata an almost cataclysmic effect. Licad’s wielding of the overloaded harmonies, the mystical Scriabin-like tonal wanderings, and the overwhelming pathos that pervades the work, was nothing short of virtuosic. She rose to the challenge of the final movement’s jarring montage of former themes in the sonata.”
Yates added: “The almost bebop-like presentation in this movement was wrought with the sort of improvisatory freshness that gives Ornstein’s works such an original sound. Licad pushed through the macabre material at a breakneck pace, eliciting the feeling of utter desperation. Licad’s performance of the Ornstein sonata stood as a passionate testament to the work of a largely forgotten composer.”
Licad noted that she heard a long ring tone in the last movement of the Ornstein sonata. “I was too busy with the piece I just had to focus.”
After the rousing standing ovation, Licad obliged with three short encores including two impressive Gottschalk pieces, “Le Bananier” (The Banana Tree) and “Pasquinade” (Caprice), along with Earl Wild’s lush arrangement of George Gershwin’s “Embraceable You.”
