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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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