Cecile Buencamino Licad was born in Manila on 11 May 1961 and studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where Mieczysław Horszowski was among her teachers. She received the Leventritt Competition gold medal in 1981, at twenty.

Her CBS Masterworks records of the early 1980s — Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto and the Paganini Rhapsody with the Chicago Symphony under Claudio Abbado, and Chopin’s Second and Saint-Saëns’s Second with André Previn and the London Philharmonic, which won the Grand Prix du Disque Frédéric Chopin from the Warsaw Chopin Society in 1985 — established her while she was still in her early twenties. She has since worked extensively in chamber music, recording the Tchaikovsky trio and Brahms’s horn trio with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Antonio Meneses and John Cerminaro, Beethoven’s variations for flute and piano with Patrick Gallois for Deutsche Grammophon’s complete edition, and the Beethoven four-hand marches with Horszowski for Marlboro’s fiftieth-anniversary album. Her 2003 Naxos disc of Louis Moreau Gottschalk is among the fuller accounts of that composer on record.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecile_Licad
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2046564