Andrea Lam| Sydney Morning Masters | 4 September 2024
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<strong>Andrea</strong> Lam<br />
THE CONCOURSE, CHATSWOOD<br />
WED 4 SEP<br />
11AM
SYDNEY<br />
MORNING<br />
MASTERS<br />
THE CONCOURSE, CHATSWOOD<br />
Wed 23 October <strong>2024</strong>, 11am<br />
Affinity Quartet string quartet<br />
Book now<br />
musicaviva.com.au/sydney-morning-masters | 1800 688 482
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Eora Nation and<br />
we pay our respects to Elders past and present – people who have sung<br />
their songs, danced their dances and told their stories on these lands<br />
for thousands of generations, and who continue to do so.<br />
PROGRAM (approximate duration: 48 min)<br />
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)<br />
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor,<br />
Op. 27 No. 2 ‘Moonlight’ (1801)<br />
I<br />
II<br />
III<br />
Adagio sostenuto<br />
Allegretto<br />
Presto agitato<br />
Frédéric CHOPIN (1810–1849)<br />
Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17 No. 4 (1832–3)<br />
Caroline SHAW (b 1982)<br />
Gustave Le Gray (2012)<br />
Frédéric CHOPIN<br />
Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1836)<br />
George GERSHWIN (1898–1937)<br />
Someone to Watch Over Me (1926, arr. Poster)<br />
16 min<br />
5 min<br />
10 min<br />
10 min<br />
5 min<br />
—<br />
<strong>Andrea</strong> Lam piano<br />
Please join <strong>Andrea</strong> for a Meet the Artist conversation, onstage directly following the concert.<br />
Please ensure that mobile phones are turned onto flight mode before the performance.<br />
Photography and video recording are not permitted during the performance.<br />
03
ANDREA LAM<br />
Pronounced a ‘real talent’ by the Wall<br />
Street Journal, Australian pianist <strong>Andrea</strong><br />
Lam performs with orchestras and leading<br />
conductors in Australasia, Japan, China<br />
and the United States, including the San<br />
Francisco Ballet Orchestra, Hong Kong<br />
Philharmonic, and all major Australian<br />
symphony orchestras. Recently returned<br />
after two decades in New York, <strong>Andrea</strong><br />
has played from New York’s Carnegie<br />
Hall and Lincoln Center to the <strong>Sydney</strong><br />
Opera House. She has appeared in<br />
<strong>Sydney</strong> Festival, Musica Viva Australia’s<br />
Huntington Festival, Orford Festival<br />
(Canada), and Chelsea Music Festival<br />
(USA) with works from Bach, Schumann<br />
and Chopin to Aaron Jay Kernis, Liliya<br />
Ugay, and Nigel Westlake.<br />
Her <strong>2024</strong> season includes soloist<br />
engagements with Queensland Symphony<br />
Orchestra with conductor Umberto Clerici,<br />
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra<br />
with conductor André de Ridder, <strong>Sydney</strong><br />
Symphony Orchestra for works by Nigel<br />
Westlake, Lior and Lou Bennett, and<br />
with Orchestra Victoria for Arts Centre<br />
Melbourne. Chamber concerts include a<br />
return to UKARIA with the Australian String<br />
Quartet, with the Australia Ensemble<br />
UNSW (<strong>Sydney</strong>), at the Sanguine<br />
Estate Music Festival, as well as solo<br />
performances at the Melbourne Recital<br />
Centre and regional touring.<br />
In 2023, <strong>Andrea</strong> featured in acclaimed<br />
performances of Schumann and<br />
Rachmaninov concerti with the <strong>Sydney</strong><br />
and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras<br />
with conductors Sir Donald Runnicles<br />
and Jaime Martín. She featured in<br />
Adelaide Festival’s Chamber Landscapes<br />
weekend curated by Paavali Jumppanen,<br />
the Ngapa William Cooper Project<br />
commissioned by UKARIA, and Finding<br />
Our Voice, composed by Lior, Lou Bennett<br />
and Nigel Westlake with the Australian<br />
String Quartet. Engagements also<br />
included the <strong>Sydney</strong> Opera House Utzon<br />
Music Series, Newcastle and Sanguine<br />
Estate Music Festivals, with the Australia<br />
Ensemble UNSW, in recital at Elder Hall<br />
with violinist Emily Sun, alongside several<br />
regional concerts. In 2022, <strong>Andrea</strong> toured<br />
Bach’s Goldberg Variations nationally<br />
for Musica Viva Australia alongside Paul<br />
Grabowsky, performed as soloist with<br />
the <strong>Sydney</strong>, Adelaide and Tasmanian<br />
Symphony Orchestras, with baritone Bo<br />
Skovhus at <strong>Sydney</strong> Opera House, and took<br />
part in the 2022 International Piano Day<br />
livestream from <strong>Sydney</strong> Opera House.<br />
Recently appointed Lecturer in Piano at<br />
the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music,<br />
<strong>Andrea</strong> holds degrees from both the Yale,<br />
and the Manhattan Schools of Music.<br />
Recordings include Mozart concerti with<br />
the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra<br />
(ABC Classics), with cellist Matt Haimovitz<br />
(Pentatone Oxingale), multiple discs as<br />
part of New York’s acclaimed Claremont<br />
Trio (Bridge, AMR, Tria) and with violinist<br />
Emily Sun on the ARIA-nominated album<br />
Nocturnes (ABC Classics). <strong>Andrea</strong>’s<br />
next album features solo piano works by<br />
Matthew Hindson, due for <strong>2024</strong> release.<br />
© Keith Saunders<br />
04
ABOUT THE MUSIC<br />
The astonishing first movement of Ludwig<br />
van Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata,<br />
one of the most recognised pieces in all<br />
of Western classical music, has become<br />
familiar to many modern ears. But in<br />
its day, its unique features drew such<br />
recurrent attention that it drove Beethoven<br />
to exasperation: ‘Everyone always talks<br />
about the C-sharp minor Sonata!’<br />
By 1801, when Beethoven penned his<br />
fourteenth sonata, it was common<br />
practice that a classical sonata would<br />
have three movements with a fast-slowfast<br />
schema, and adherence to certain<br />
key relationships. First movements<br />
were usually the weightiest, with tightly<br />
organised structures helping to convey<br />
a work’s character and themes. Thus,<br />
when Beethoven began his C-sharp minor<br />
Sonata (in itself, a rarely used key) in a<br />
slow, improvisatory manner subdued in<br />
darkness, finishing with a movement of<br />
unrelenting storminess, the break from<br />
tradition was dramatic.<br />
Beethoven was in the habit of pushing<br />
the turn-of-the-19th-century critics’<br />
understanding to the limits. Another<br />
significant stride from classical models<br />
was in Beethoven’s subtitle, Sonata quasi<br />
una fantasia – Sonata in the style of<br />
a fantasy (a name he also gave to his<br />
overshadowed thirteenth sonata). With this<br />
title, Beethoven appears to signal that his<br />
sonata be contemplated with the Romantic<br />
qualities of freedom and the vulnerabilities<br />
of emotion in mind. Commentators praised<br />
Beethoven for his ‘ardent imagination’<br />
and ability to preserve coherence in the<br />
sonata, as if ‘hewn from a single block of<br />
marble’. But its darker mood and technical<br />
challenges drove numerous reviewers to<br />
warn young keyboard players in search of<br />
‘light amusement’ to reconsider.<br />
In the opening Adagio sostenuto,<br />
Beethoven instructs the performer to play<br />
‘with the greatest delicacy’, keeping the<br />
dynamics at predominantly soft levels<br />
throughout. Pianist Stephen Hough<br />
reverently describes this first movement<br />
as ‘a tuneless wash of colour with gentle<br />
triplets blurred into mystery through<br />
long pedals and bass textures’. The<br />
work’s immediate popularity and poetic<br />
sensibilities ensured there was to be no<br />
shortage of Romantic metaphor from<br />
observers. French composer Hector<br />
Berlioz felt it as a ‘lamentation … the sun<br />
setting over the Roman countryside …<br />
no living being disturbs the peace of<br />
the tombs that cover this desolate earth,<br />
one contemplates, one admires, one<br />
weeps, one is silent.’ Some 30 years after<br />
Beethoven composed the work (and<br />
several years after his death), the German<br />
poet Ludwig Rellstab explained that the<br />
piece made him imagine ‘a small boat<br />
visiting the wild places on Lake Lucerne by<br />
moonlight’. Beethoven had never visited<br />
Lake Lucerne, but Rellstab’s celebrated<br />
nickname has persisted.<br />
In contrast to the solemn opening, the<br />
second movement is a short, lilting minuet<br />
and trio, which Liszt famously referred<br />
to as the ‘flower between two abysses’.<br />
Without break or surrender, the third<br />
movement is launched with a flurry of<br />
C-sharp minor arpeggios, transformed<br />
from the same three notes that had<br />
opened the sonata with such stillness.<br />
Hough explains how they have now<br />
returned ‘with ferocity and velocity, and<br />
punching accents on the final beats of the<br />
bar … sharing with the later Appassionata<br />
Sonata Finale an unwillingness to let any<br />
light brighten the mood. It is turbulent<br />
without respite.’<br />
© ANGELA TURNER<br />
05
ABOUT THE MUSIC<br />
Caroline Shaw writes:<br />
Frédéric Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor,<br />
Op. 17 No. 4 is exquisite. The opening<br />
alone contains a potent poetic balance<br />
between the viscosity and density of the<br />
descending harmonic progression and the<br />
floating onion skin of the loose, chromatic<br />
melody above. Or, in fewer words – it’s<br />
very prosciutto and mint.<br />
When someone asks me, “So what is<br />
your music like?” – I’ll sometimes answer<br />
(depending on who’s asking), “Kind of<br />
like sashimi?” That is, it’s often made<br />
of chords and sequences presented in<br />
their raw, naked, preciously unadorned<br />
state – vividly fresh and new, yet utterly<br />
familiar. Chopin is a different type of<br />
chef. He covers much more harmonic real<br />
estate than I do, and his sequences are<br />
more varied and inventive. He weaves a<br />
textured narrative through his harmony<br />
that takes you through different characters<br />
and landscapes, whereas I’d sometimes<br />
be happy listening to a single well-framed,<br />
perfectly-voiced triad. But the frame is<br />
the hard part – designing the perfectly<br />
attuned and legible internal system of<br />
logic and memory that is strong but<br />
subtle enough to support an authentic<br />
emotional experience of return. (Not to<br />
get all Proustian or anything.) In some<br />
way that I can’t really understand or<br />
articulate yet, photographs can do this<br />
with a remarkable economy of means.<br />
Translating that elusive syntax into music<br />
is an interesting challenge. Then again,<br />
sometimes music is just music.<br />
Gustave Le Gray is a multi-layered<br />
portrait of Op. 17 No. 4 using some of<br />
Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged<br />
together with my own. It was written<br />
expressly for pianist Amy Yang, who is one<br />
of the truest artists I’ve ever met.<br />
© CAROLINE SHAW<br />
[Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) was a<br />
French artist particularly noted for his<br />
advancements in photography; the<br />
composer’s expressive indications on<br />
the score of this work include ‘like a<br />
photograph slowly developing on wax<br />
paper’.]<br />
The first of Chopin’s four ballades was<br />
sketched between May and June of 1831,<br />
when the composer was whiling away<br />
his time in Vienna, virtually unknown.<br />
The composition was completed in Paris<br />
four years later. By that time, reputation,<br />
fame and fortune were a part of Chopin’s<br />
life. The Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23<br />
is dedicated to Baron de Stockhausen,<br />
Hanoverian Ambassador to France. It<br />
ranges in expression from tranquillity to<br />
extreme agitation and exemplifies the<br />
composer’s ability to weave, in one fabric,<br />
lines of cantabile melodies and flashing<br />
displays of virtuosity.<br />
© MUSICA VIVA AUSTRALIA<br />
The 1926 prohibition-era musical Oh, Kay!,<br />
with music by George Gershwin and a<br />
book co-written by P.G. Wodehouse, is<br />
best remembered for the enduring ballad<br />
‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, sung by the<br />
titular Lady Kay to her ragdoll around the<br />
start of the second act. Though Gershwin’s<br />
original tempo marking called for a<br />
snappier interpretation, the slower versions<br />
recorded during the 1930s and 40s have<br />
since become standard; Ella Fitzgerald’s<br />
1959 recording arguably remains the bestknown.<br />
This morning’s arrangement, made<br />
by the British pianist and composer Tom<br />
Poster, is closest in spirit to Ella’s version –<br />
lithe, jazzy and suffused with longing.<br />
© LUKE IREDALE <strong>2024</strong><br />
06
Ensemble Q<br />
& William Barton<br />
Frankly, this was a jaw-dropping performance.<br />
Limelight (on Ensemble Q)<br />
The possibilities are extraordinary.<br />
William Barton is a great man. He radiates.<br />
Sir Simon Rattle<br />
National Tour: 30 Sep–12 Oct<br />
TICKETS FROM $62<br />
musicaviva.com.au/ensembleq-barton<br />
1800 688 482 (no booking fees)
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