Licad: Peerless on the piano

In the month of June 2002, pianist Cecile Licad was on a solo concert tour which took her to five ports-of-call: June 19, Rizal Day, at the residence of German Ambassador to the Philippines Herbert D. Jess, presented by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Friends of Cecile Licad; June 21, Laoag City, presented by the Provincial Governor of Ilocos Norte at Malacañang Ti Amianan; June 24, CCP Main Theater, presented by the Buencamino Foundation and the Cultural Center of the Philippines; June 26, Marco Polo Hotel Ballroom, Davao City, presented by the Southern Philippines Foundation for Arts, Culture, and Ecology and Bahaghari Productions; and June 30, Silangan Gardens, No.1 Sierra Madre, Grand Heights, Antipolo City, presented by the Institute of Neuro Sciences of the St. Luke’s Medical Center.

The tour of Licad was preceded by a concert at the CCP Main Theater with the San Miguel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Maestro Rodel Fernando Colmenar.

Maestro Colmenar – it may be recalled – conducted concerts with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra in Metro Manila’s major shopping malls during the Yuletide season under the sponsorship of Guess?. Attired in Guess? jeans, the musicians of the MPO and their young conductor sought to bring classical music to the teeming multitudes in the malls. In the course of time, however, they played less and less of the classics and more and more of popular music. The triumph of mob rule?

Now Maestro Colmenar is back in harness with a vengeance with a more powerful musical force – the SMPO whose members seem to have been gleaned from other orchestras and from various conservatories of music. In its initial concert, One Classical Evening, the SMPO presented works by Mozart, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff.

The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera. The libretto, based on a tale of fantasy, was penned by a friend who, like the composer, was a Freemason. The Overture contains two contrasting ideas, a solemn theme that contains cryptic Masonic symbolism and a fugato brimming with vim and vigor that suggests the joyful spirit of the Natural Man. Maestro Colmenar and the SMPO sounded ponderous enough for the first idea, but sounded too heavy in the second to sparkle and bubble. Paring down the orchestra even more to the size of a chamber group would have achieved this effect and given Mozart’s music greater clarity and grace.

Maestro Colmenar and his fledgling orchestra delivered a much more creditable account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, Op. 47. Of the 15 symphonies of the Russian composer, the fifth has been the most highly appreciated by the general musical public. He composed during the Stalin regime when artists were under close scrutiny by government censors to make them toe the line according to Socialist aesthetic ideals.

Of his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich declared that its basic idea "is the creation of individuality. More simply, a man with his emotions, questions, doubts, and life experiences. I saw him as the center of this composition, which is lyrical by construction – from beginning to end; the Finale of the Symphony resolves all the tragically strained moments of the first three movements. The plan of the work is optimistic."

I wonder if the composer did not make this statement to mislead his communist censors. Listening to the symphony, one is entranced by its melodic appeal and grandiose orchestration, but can one miss the caustic irony and the vulgar humor framed by a mock-heroic structure of epic proportions? Stalin and his cohorts have turned to dust. The communist monolith has crumbled. But the arts of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich have prevailed.

The Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 that followed, on the whole, is conventional in structure but at the same time it departs from convention in its treatment of thematic ideas. It begins with a statement of the first theme, a captivating tune that seems to take possession of both soloist and orchestra such that they won’t let it go. It recurs complete, in part, or in various permutations. There is a second theme, as might be expected, but it is dropped for the rest of the movement which is totally enthralled by the first.

The second movement is an Intermezzo that releases a wisp of a motif – or a fragment of it – meditative, introspective, sweet in its sadness. Before the conclusion, a new subject of martial character breaks the prevailing melancholy. The movement ends with a sudden outburst that leads without pause to the Finale: Alla breve. The second theme that has been virtually ignored in the first movement dominates the last and only for a brief moment is the beautiful theme of the first movement recollected before the thunderous coda.

Who ever thought of turning off the lights in the theater during an extended cadenza to show off the pianist’s mastery of the keyboard even in the dark had a pedestrian taste for the cheap excitement of the circus which would display a trapeze artist who walks on a tightrope without a safety net.

Needless to say, Licad reigned over the performance like a merciless dominatrix that her audience could do nothing less than pay her homage with a standing ovation.

Exactly a week later, she whipped her audience again into submission with a solo recital in the same theater. Her repertoire included Chopin’s 12 Etudes, Op. 25, Schubert’s Impromptus, Op. 142, D. 935 (No.1 and No.4 both in F minor) and Liszt’s Annees de Pelerinage, "St. Francis de Paola, Walking on the Waters" from the Deux Legendes and the Mephisto Waltz, as arranged by Busoni.

All of these works from the golden age of Romanticism Licad rendered with as much intelligence as feeling, with uncanny insight into the technical and stylistic dimensions of each individual piece and with a mastery of the art of the pianoforte second to none in our part of the world. Her fingers caressed the ivory like velvet or pounded them like stainless steel.

Licad has been hailed by enraptured audiences in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. She has collaborated in concert halls and on records with the world’s greatest orchestras under the most respected conductors of our time, like Claudio Abbado, Andrew Davis, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Masur, Sir Neville Marriner, Zubin Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Seiji Ozawa, Andre Previn, Sir Georg Solti, Mstislav Rostropovich, Michael Tilson Thomas and Pinchas Zukerman, among many others.

What can a poor moonlighting columnist say about an artist of the highest magnitude about whom the most authoritative critics of three continents have exhausted all superlatives? Feel like a gutter rat in the slime gazing up, speechless with awe and wonder-struck, at a brilliant star in the firmament.

* * *

For comments, write to jessqcruz@hotmail.com.