Pianist Extraordinaire

CEBU, Philippines — It’s one thing to be able to do something and another thing to do it well. When it comes to the piano, Ingrid Sala Santamaria is great – legendary even.

Born February 1940 in Cebu City, Santamaria is among Cebu’s, if not the country’s, most celebrated pianist.

She received her Bachelor of Music degree in Piano at the Battig Piano School in Cebu City under her mother, Pilar Blanco Sala.

She would study further at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York under Josef Raieff. In 1962, Santamaria received her Master of Music degree from the Sta. Isabel College of Music in Manila under Aida S. Gonzalez.

Santamaria also learned through intensive coaching lessons under prominent Filipino pianists Benjamin Tupas, Reynaldo Reyes, and Jose Contreras.

In 2006, she would be conferred the Doctor of Music Education degree honoris causa by the De La Salle University Manila.

Santamaria has had a number of performances, whether solo, chamber, or with an orchestra, in and out of the country.

In 1965, she began a ten-year hiatus from music to teach Spanish at the International School in Manila. Once more in 1991 until 2000, she took another ten-year sabbatical.

As chair of the Salvador and Pilar Sala Foundation, Inc. (SPSFI), Santamaria kept busy at the helm of a ten-year music development program which eventually produced the Cebu Youth Orchestra (CYSO) in 1995— churning out talented and honorable musicians from their young and deserving scholars through their training and performance initiatives.

In 2000, the CYSO evolved into the Peace Philharmonic Philippines, known as the only orchestra group south of Manila. With the building of the CYSO development program, Santamaria also gathered Cebu’s piano teachers, organizing them as the Cebu Piano Teachers’ Guild, Inc.

Between 2000 and 2009, Santamaria, alongside US-based mentor Maestro Reynaldo G. Reyes, logged almost 400 concerts all over the Philippines and in Asian and US cities through her iniative, “Romantic Piano Concerto Journey Tours,” a bi-annual outreach educational program series.

The program focused on concertos of the Romantic Period and saw her as the soloist, while Prof. Reyes did the orchestra part on a second piano. The concerts were followed with an open forum.

In her desire to add something unique, Santamaria commissioned PPP Music Director Prof. Jeffrey R. Solares to transcribe orchestral and second piano accompaniments to Romantic Concertos into String Quartet form.

This is inspired by her mother and first piano teacher, who performed the Chopin Concerto No. 1 in E minor in Cebu City in 1949 in commemoration of Frederich Franscois Chopin’s 100th death anniversary. She saidher faculty arrange a string quartet accompaniment for them to perform together.

Since 2003, Santamaria has showcased this evolution through performances with the PPP String Quartet.

With over 50 years in the field of music, she has awards like that of Cebu’s Most Notable Cebuanos in 2000, and the Chevalier Dans L’Ordre National Du Merite by decree of then French Republic President Jacques Chirac in 2004, among others.

Now in her 70s, Santamaria, who splits her time between Manila and Cebu, has shared her music in many other ways. Apart from educating and performing, she entered the digital playing field in 2008 when she began a YouTube channel that features recent concerts and vintage performances