Pianist Cecile Licad won the Leventritt Award, one of classical music's highest honors for a young player, in 1980. She went on to a career that is international in scope.

Licad was born in Manila on May 11, 1961. Her family was musical; her uncle Francisco Buencamino was a noted composer and pianist. She began piano lessons with her mother at three but soon outgrew those and was driven by her father, with classical music playing on the radio, for lessons with top Filipino teacher Rosario Picazo. At seven, Licad made her debut with the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. Parental pressure included bribes with cigarettes if she would practice; Licad took up smoking at 11. She caught the attention of Filipino leader Ferdinand Marcos and received government support for study in the U.S. At 12, she auditioned for the flabbergasted Rudolf Serkin in Philadelphia, who said that when he was her age, he "could not touch what she is doing." Licad studied at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music with Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Seymour Lipkin, and in 1977, she was accepted as Serkin's student. In 1980, she won the Leventritt Award, a major honor then marked by the fact that, as with the MacArthur Foundation "genius grants," winners did not even know they were being considered. That was the beginning of a high-flying career for the young pianist. Licad has appeared with most of the major American orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra, as well as orchestras abroad. Rudolf Serkin's son Peter also took an interest in her career and performed and recorded with her in duo piano repertory. Licad is also an enthusiastic chamber music player, performing at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, and New York's Lincoln Center with violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Her repertory runs generally from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. She has continued to tour in her native Philippines.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Licad recorded for the CBS and MusicMasters labels. The demise of the latter label in 1999 put a crimp in her recording career, but she bounced back with a noted recording of music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk the following year. Licad has since recorded for Hyperion, Newton Classics, and Danacord. Much of her energy in the late 2010s was devoted to a series of recordings titled "Anthology of American Piano Music"; she issued the fourth recording in that series, devoted to George Gershwin, in 2020. ~ James Manheim, Rovi