Pianist Andrea Lam leads a celebration of live music’s return

The pandemic silenced live music for two years, now pianist Andrea Lam celebrates its return.

Andrea Lam performed Mozart with her childhood heroes. Picture: Sydney Symphony Orchestra

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As a child, pianist Andrea Lam used to have a photograph of Sydney Symphony Orchestra stuck on her closet door. She dreamt a performing with them and when she did get to do it at the age of 13 it was an experience she describes as “pretty surreal”.

Now she is back with them performing one of Mozart’s most popular piano concertos, the No. 22 K482, and revelling in the newly improved acoustics of the Concert Hall, where she spent so many happy hours before she left Australia for America for 20 years to carve out an impressive career. She returned to Australia in 2020 when Covid closed concert halls.

This performance with the SSO under the baton of Johannes Fritzsch, principal conductor and artistic adviser of Queensland Symphony Orchestra, formed the centrepiece of a program of works celebrating the positive return of live music after a difficult two years.

The concert got out of the blocks quickly with the premiere of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Momentum, a work commissioned by the SSO for its 50 Fanfares Project, described by the composer as a “musical pick me up” – a “kickstart” – after normal life ground to a halt in lockdown.

Vivid, vibrant and accessible, like most of her music, the bright optimistic sounds of xylophones, marimbas, piano and harp vied with strings, winds and brass in the driving and building opening, while bassoon and winds marked the start of a more reflective middle section, solos being tossed around the band, before momentum was restored for the rousing finale.

Lam’s performance of the Mozart was beautifully judged and executed, the sparkling top notes and power of the left hand part in the cadenza at the end of the first movement sounding magnificent with the new warm and precise acoustic. The bouncy melody of the final movement was irresistible under her fingers. Fritzsch kept tempos, entrances and exits tight but not stiflingly so, and the woodwind section, led by the twin clarinets of Alexander Morris and Christopher Tingay, were in excellent form.

Johannes Fritzsch conducted Sydney Symphony Orchestra in a concert of Mozart, Schumann and Elena Kats-Chernin. Picture: Richard Jupe

If the winds were the stars of the Mozart it was the turn of the brass section – five horns, three trombones and two trumpets – in the second half performance of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, his tribute to the mighty Rhine and Cologne’s magnificent Gothic cathedral.

Here Fritzsch, who now lives with his family in Hobart, was very much on home turf and the orchestra, led with characteristic and affable aplomb by Andrew Haveron, responded willingly for a standout performance of this work – the most popular of Schumann’s four symphonies – the blaze of brass in the final movement reaching Brucknerian proportions.

The concert will be repeated at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Sunday, October 9, at 2pm.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Andrea Lam performs Mozart

• WHERE Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

• WHEN Thursday, October 6