Anything to hear Cecile Licad and watch her play

Her hands           Photos by ANNA LEAH SARABIA

She hums.

The piano she later signed

Passion...

...and strength!

We never have enough of her.

Admirers cross generations.

How can I forget the Kawit performance of people's pianist Cecile Licad in March of
2012 when it began with a middle-aged woman and a recuperating-from-a-stroke senior trying to wade through the thickets of Dasmariñas and Bacoor in Cavite 

to get to the Island Cove recital venue in Kawit on time? That surreal Sunday 

ended with a towering inferno rated by the fire fighters as a four-alarm 

situation. 

The memory beats the time Ms. Licad continued playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto 

No. 3 in the dark when the lights went out at the Cultural Center

and the orchestra backing her up just ground to a halt. The emergency lights weren't on until five or so minutes later. Then there was the time she and her son 

Otavio, on separate pianos, performed a Poulenc concerto, a favorite of my 

US-based aesthete friend, Benjie Abellera.  

Benjie wasn't with me that evening. Reeking with envy that I was privileged 

to witness the event, he annotated it days later in an email, how 

"the slow movement has the notation that it should be played in the style 

of Indonesian Gamelan music, one of the types of music I enjoy most for its 

ethereal, dreamy and other-worldly quality. It could well be that your dream was accompanied by this type of music! Gamelan music influenced other French composers 

such as Debussy and Ravel. I don't think that any German composers fell sway 

to it. Must tell us something about the French versus the German artistic 

temperament. I would also have loved (to have heard) the Buencamino piece. 

Am trying to learn an Abelardo piano piece which isn't at all easy to play so I may

never get to learn to play it! Have the Licads put their genius to CD?  Wouldn't it

be such joy for all of us if they had done so?"

Back to March 25 last year. It proved to me to what lengths Ms. Licad's 

admirers would go to see and listen to her play Chopin's selected etudes, 

his Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, Op. 61 and Andante spianato et Grand Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22, the last the recital organizer and foremost Licad  groupie Pablo Tariman didn't fail to point out as the same piece that the actor Adrien Brody played at the close of the Polanski

film The Pianist.  

From the village where I picked him up convalescing friend Rustie was 

wheeled to a spot where a tricycle picked us up to ferry us to the highway, then we boarded a bus that took us to SM Bacoor where we got into a public utility van to Island Cove.

The barker misheard our destination, and we were dropped at the wrong resort. Two more rides (a jeep and a mini bus) 

and we got it right.

Entering the right resort this time, I thought we would also take the golf 
trolley to the venue until R's friend, Tita, spotted him hobbling on his cane 

with me assisting. For a few seconds we rode in air-conditioned comfort in 
time to catch Chopin in Ms. Licad's hands.

The original Island Cove venue, a cockpit outfitted into a performing hall, was crackling and brittle and sparks were flying when the air-conditioner and lights went on during the technicals.The recital was thus moved to a more intimate function room as a precaution

while Pablo fretted over the Borsendorfer as movers carried it like a baby.

Rustie was quickly hustled by other friends to a front seat. At some point I saw his head
bowed low, and I sensed he was shedding tears from the beauty of it all (he was 
indeed). This came after our mishaps that he said was straight out of Keaton's Cops.

A day or two later, Pablo, in typical self-deprecating humor, texted to ask if I saw his life passing by when Ms. Licad interpreted Liszt's Après une 

Lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata, the wailing sinners licked by the 
fires of hell. I had no quick retort. 

I did agree with him that Ms. Licad's last recital for that visit, after the 

much-ballyhooed "The Legends and the Classics" and her first-time recital at 
the Holy Angels University auditorium in her father's home province of 
Pampanga, was the most dramatic and the audience's response most heartfelt

that she obliged with more than the usual two encores. 

She beamed, practically glowed, as she gestured with her hand, touching her heart, 

then raising it to the audience that was up on its feet, still not wanting to let her go.

As Anna Leah Sarabia said, "We can't seem to have enough of her."

Anna documented in photos that strange, but in the end, lovely afternoon. 

Meanwhile, there are still a few good seats to this Saturday's (June 29)

Licad concert with the ABS-CBN Orchestra under Gerard Salonga at the CCP 

main theater. 

Her program: Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Totentanz for Piano and 
Orchestra. Call 5763132 or 09065104270.

Is That You, Monsieur Chopin?

This genius of his age once exhorted, "Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel!"

But I never encountered a more cerebral classical pianist than the Frenchman Pascal Rogé. His program of "Chopin and French Impressionism" at the Philamlife Auditorium last night was performed the way a deeply knowledgeable curator would guide you through a history of period music by Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel and yes, the man whose bicentennial is being celebrated this year, the Polish musician who conquered France and the rest of Europe, who prematurely died of tuberculosis and whose heart is buried in his homeland and in all who continue to cherish his music.

Perhaps Rogé has nothing more to prove. He wasn't there to dazzle or impress us with fiery techniques; he is past that. When this ruggedly handsome performer strode onstage, he acquired the demeanor of a professor as he put on his glasses and played non-stop for at least an hour the nocturnes, valses, mazurkas and etudes of the composers earlier cited. No pause at all to acknowledge appreciative applause although there were one or two audience members who couldn't contain themselves.

We had to refrain from clapping after each piece as his interpretation seemed to be meant as one whole seamless piece where he tried to show us the differences and the likenesses of the composers of that period. All that was lacking was the voice-over of a lecture.

And always in the first and second parts of his program, Rogé closed with a Chopin piece as though to put the exclamation point to an entire periodic sentence running into several pages. In the second set of pieces, he alternated Debussy and Chopin till it was hard to tell them apart until you catch a familiar passage.

Nonetheless, Chopin's agony and ecstasy were evoked as were the suggestions of water Debussy unfailingly makes (to me, his is water music: waves licking shore, veils of waterfall, rain splattering on pavement and stones).

Retired music reviewer Anna Leah Sarabia, who still frequents concert halls, said in recognizing Chopin's genius and his embodying the spirit of his age, "He had the capacity to create monumental structures out of so much passion and tension. From them emerged exquisite treasures."

Rogé gave in to the two standing ovations the audience of a few hundred gave him with the piece (our personal favorite and the one I wished aloud he'd play) "Gymnopedie" by Erik Satie. This composer, dismissed in his time as clumsy and repetitive, had no qualms of calling his pieces furniture music, something best played as background to other activities. Well, it is the music I will specify in my living will as the one to be repetitively played till I breathe my last.

To Rogé we owe gratitude for playing against what producer Ray Sison described as "all odds of the storm landing in Manila. He will brave it and so will hundreds of us! I heard him this weekend in Hong Kong, and he means every note that comes out of his fingers."

Our next fervent wish is to hear Rogé again, this time playing four hands with his life partner Ami

Mr. Sison and all supporters/producers of live classical music concerts, are you listening?

Rogé signs diary of delighted fan. Photo by ANNA LEAH SARABIA