CECILE LICAD'S TONES OF HOME

Taking logistics by the lapel of its tuxedo, several classical musicians have dared to play in the most unfeasible spots on earth: Daniel Barenboim took the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to Ramallah in the West Bank; Yo-Yo Ma performed right at the border between the US and Mexico; and Ludovico Einaudi played a Steinway on a floating platform in the Arctic, in the middle of glaciers and murmuring winds. It's interesting how the most achingly familiar pieces of music come from the strangest of places. When asked by my editor Millet Mananquil what Cecile Licad hasn't done in the Philippines but dreams of someday doing, Cecile smiles and answers: to play atop the Banaue Rice Terraces.

- IGAN D'BAYAN

Imagine strains of Chopin or Rachmaninoff being coaxed by the pianist from a solitary Hamburg Steinway grand perched atop the carved hill, in an event blessed by the vanguards of Ifugao. Downhill there'd be a throng of open-mouthed onlookers. This is but a dream, of course. But dreaming, in these tempestuous times, is our last flexing of freedom. And Cecile Licad, the girl who lived in Quezon City until she was 11 and moved to America to become (according to The New Yorker) the pianist's pianist, still loves that sweet, extraordinary cadenza of dreams.

'My dream? To someday play atop the Banaue Rice Terraces.'

"I grew up very ordinarily," confesses Cecile. "Nothing special. Our family was weird in a sense that there'd be not enough food for everyone, and everybody's always scrambling." She was kind of a tomboy then, fending off her big brothers at the dinner table. But there was already a piano in the Buencamino-Licad household, waiting for the right pair of hands (probably like the lightsaber hidden in a chest in a scene from The Force Awakens, beckoning the Jedi in the making).

"The piano was where nobody could bother me, it was my safety net," she says. The young Cecile would eavesdrop on her mother, Rosario, as she taught music theory to her sons. But it was the girl who soaked it all in. Flash forward to the present - following decades in a distant key - Cecile is back in the country for a series of outreach concerts (from Pinto Art Museum to Iloilo to Virac, Catanduanes) plus a main one presented by Rustan's at the Manila Metropolitan Theater on Sept. 24, 6:30 p.m.

In the days leading up to the gig, every morning she eats a particular dish because it reminds her of that long-ago home. This woman can eat whatever she likes but chooses paksiw.

"I like the sourness. I grew up with that. As a young girl, when I was practicing in the morning with my father, he'd go to the