★★★★☆ Inspiring stories abound in benefit performance by Hoang Pham.

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne
October 23, 2016

In 1985 a young couple, Hung and Tham, squashed themselves onto a 9-metre boat with others fleeing communist Vietnam. Their son Hoang was a few months old. After being adrift at sea for a month, the family eventually made it to Australia and were settled as refugees. Hung had been a piano teacher in Vietnam, and nurtured his son’s early musical development in their Housing Commission flat in Melbourne. Eventually Hoang was taken on as a pupil by one of Australia’s most phenomenal pianists, Rita Reichman. On the strength of a talent so prodigious that, as a toddler, she could play anything she heard by ear, Rita, her mother, brother and sister were whisked from very modest circumstances in mid-1960s Melbourne by a wealthy New York benefactor; Rita was offered a scholarship at the Juilliard School when she was five. Reichman’s parents were also refugees; her mother Mara’s entire family was executed in the Holocaust. These background commonalities are likely contributors, along with tremendous musical virtuosity, to a bond between teacher and pupil that lasted 17 years.

Pham is passionate about the contribution made by refugees to Australia, and is a proud participant in the ‘I Came by Boat’ campaign. He is also acutely conscious of the sufferings and hardships of others, and as a consequence extensively involved in charity work. This evening’s performance was a benefit for Back to School, an organisation which raises money to assist children who are victims of exploitation, abuse and family violence in Vietnam with holistic programmes centred on education, social activities and therapy. Its director, Huong Dang, also experienced tremendous hardship as a child, clearly a driving force in her work for Back to School. She addressed a packed Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, briefly outlining her work and the chance meeting with Hoang that culminated in today’s performance.

To open, Pham leapt into two works by Brahms – the tempestuous Rhapsody in B Minor, Op. 79 No 2, and the Intermezzo in A, Op. 118 No 2, both delivered with utter assurance, force and delicacy. However, Pham also clearly relishes core Russian Romantic repertoire – his performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto won him the 2013 ABC Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year – but today it’s Rachmaninov that features heavily. The dense and magnificently relentless Second Piano Sonata in B Flat, Op. 36 was the programme’s centrepiece, its wall-of-sound immersiveness balanced by delicate watery trills in the first movement, with Pham navigating the technical and emotional demands with ease.

Pham’s love of Rachmaninov also extended to sharing one of his little jokes with the audience. According to legend, the composer, annoyed at constant requests to perform his famous C Sharp Minor Prelude, Op. 3 No 2 (written, most precociously, at the age of 19), would sometimes play its three opening, instantly recognisable chords and then launch straight into Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu, also, conveniently, in the key of C Sharp Minor. Pham performed this slightly treated form of the Impromptu, following it with four Rachmaninov Preludes including the C Sharp Minor, which remains (despite composer weariness) an endlessly mysterious piece of thundering volcanic intensity.

More Brahms to finish: Hungarian Dances 1, 7 and 6, and a Waltz, Op. 39, beautifully delivered with sprightly nuance, and rightly great favourites with the audience. Not quite as much as the three Chopin encores that followed, however – the Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9 No 2, Waltz in C Sharp Minor, Op. 64 No 2, and the Waltz in A Flat, Op. 69 No 1, after all of which an audible collective sigh of delight preceded the thunderous applause. It was a densely packed programme in which Pham’s technical prowess and tonal range was clearly evident, from strength of forte to lyricism of melodic phrasing. It was impossible not to be moved by the tremendous degree of love and goodwill in the room for this favourite son of Melbourne’s Vietnamese community, no doubt enhanced by this generous benefit performance