BY CELINE CHONG, LEAD WRITER (QLD)
With a string of major prizes to his name, it’s no surprise that Vietnamese-born Australian pianist Hoang Pham has cemented his place on the piano scene.
In the lead-up to his solo recital at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, we caught up with Hoang to chat all things career paths, performance opportunities, and a new prize he’ll be donating to the 2020 Sydney International Piano Competition.
Hi Hoang, so nice to meet you! And by the sounds of it, you’ve had quite a career, with various prizes at the Lev Vlassenko, Sydney International, and Australian National Piano Award competitions. How have these helped to shape your development as a young artist?
I think each of these competitions helped me in some small way to advance my development into who I am today. The performance opportunities that came with winning all of these competitions were small but important. Sometimes, winning a competition can be very personal and for me especially, each time, it helped me to feel confident that my performances were at least being noted by some and this encouraged me to take the next step.
When I won the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition in 2005, I was only 20 years old and played my first full-length recital only days after winning the competition. Three years on, and the prize for the Best Australian Pianist gave me concerts in Sydney in subsequent years that helped me build contacts in the city which I still maintain today. Likewise, after I won the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year Award in 2013, it gave me the confidence to present my own concerts and to pursue my passion for playing solo recitals and concerto performances and to present the events myself. These days, I run my own company and perform in major venues in Melbourne; and recently, I started to perform yearly in Sydney, and for the first time in Adelaide in 2017.
I guess I had a very traditional path through the classical music world. I took my weekly lessons with my teacher Rita Reichman up until the end of high school, then I went to the Australian National Academy of Music for a year and a bit, went overseas for many years and studied at Manhattan School of Music and Royal College of Music in London, and competed at numerous national and international competitions. I was like many others, trying to get places, making contacts, seeing if I could get my foot in the door in as many places as possible. However, I knew deep down that I wasn’t a traveller and that I wanted to play concerts and play my very best. I wanted a comfortable life that wasn’t based around looking for concerts, but more around making my own events and looking after myself and ultimately, connecting directly to my audience.
Having said this, I play a large number of concerts per year where my management does all the work and I turn up and perform. However, the things I enjoy the most are the concerts I present. It is like your own wedding!
I’m sure there must have been a few challenges with all that success! What was something you didn’t expect, or found particularly challenging?
The only thing I found challenging right throughout my time developing as a musician was the feeling of wondering when I would be independent. I was unlike many of my colleagues and I never enjoyed the ecosystem of the classical music world. I never wanted to know a hundred conductors in order to get performances; I stayed at home and never went to summer festivals during my breaks. I did competitions, but only because I didn’t know what else to do with my time or what else I ought to have done because I was never educated otherwise. I had to find an alternative path on my own.
I don’t really know how I did this. I think it happened little by little as I started to present my own events – at first small – and then I realised that instead of spending my money travelling to festivals, music school, competitions, I’d rather work that second or third job in order to save up for a venue hire deposit!
You’re going to be playing a recital at the City Recital Hall in Sydney on October 13, and the program looks stellar! Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Schubert, and finishing with the Strauss/Schulz-Evler Concert Arabesques on ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’. What were your inspirations behind this program and do you have a personal favourite?
The program here was inspired by the coupling of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and Schubert’s Sonata D958, both in the key of C minor – but even more crucially, I felt, both written in the same spirit. I never read any literature that suggested to me this link but having studied and performed both works, it is clear that Schubert had Beethoven’s work in mind. Besides the obvious thematic and rhythmic similarities of certain themes, there is a drive and pathos about the works which make them wonderful program companions.
All the other works on the program were chosen to contrast these lengthy sonatas with shorter works of both lyrical and virtuosic character. The Strauss transcription I had not performed for ages, so it was a bit of a personal thing to get it back into the repertoire, besides it being an extremely charming arrangement.
These are all timeless and very well-known pieces, so tell us about your process of interpretation. Do you take a ‘blank canvas’ approach or a more traditional one, looking back to what other pianists have done? Or a balance of both?
The only approach I ever take is to never play any other way except the way I want to play. In the classical music world, there are many people who profess to know more than the next person about this and that. I don’t pretend I know everything. In fact, I prefer to sit on the fence of knowing less than the next person. My English teacher use to say: the greatest wisdom is to acknowledge you don’t know it all, so you have every reason to keep on learning! However, knowing less doesn’t mean you can’t give a performance that is full of humanity. The latter is the most crucial because if you don’t do 100 per cent of you, then I feel that you’re not being totally honest.
Having said all this, I think I’m more of a traditionalist in that I adore pre-war piano playing. There is a sense of abandonment, beauty of line and colour that is missing from most of today’s performances. And I love hearing wrong notes and detest perfection! I think it’s not really possible to have a ‘blank canvas’ so to speak, because everybody has their own experiences and individual prejudices. Very often, the person who claims they are a ‘blank canvas’ will have even more of a subjective view of things. Music is created and then played by humans, hence I enjoy the hilarious paradoxes of life, the wonder and mystery of love and deception that humans get themselves into. I can’t see where there can possibly be balance, only an undercurrent of emotions waiting to pour out. No audience member goes home talking about balance – they talk about that crescendo that you played in the middle of a piece that gave them goosebumps. They’d wait another year to hear it again!
You’re also going to be donating a prize for the 2020 Sydney International Piano Competition. Tell us about the prize and your motivations behind giving back to the Sydney International.
The prize is a solo recital in Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at Melbourne Recital Centre presented by my company and the prize is for the Best Australian Pianist. I know that my motivation is genuine. I really feel there is a lack of opportunity for Australian pianists to perform recitals at major venues in front of a large supportive public. I have experienced this myself and I feel I’m in the position to present and support our very best and committed musicians.
I don’t know what an individual like me can do for everybody but at least through this prize, I can show our local public that it is worth turning up to see somebody Australian, at our own world class venues. I feel there is potential here that has been ignored for many years. I’m excited to be honest to see what comes of it!
Finally, what are you top three tips for aspiring young pianists and musicians?
- Practice hard when you are young, and perform as much as possible, because when you get older, you won’t have time!
- Don’t just think of performing as travelling around all over the place and being as popular as possible with every symphony orchestra and presenter out there. Enjoy life and find time to do the things you enjoy outside of music. If it’s really the music you love, then you should love it staying in just one city and doing the most efficient work you can do. And surely, this must include presenting your own concerts!
- Save money because nothing ever happens without you investing in your own interests, whether it’s a house, your own children, or your own music career.
Hoang Pham performs at City Recital Hall on October 13 and South Melbourne Town Hall on November 3. He has also made a generous donation to the 2020 Sydney International Piano Competition, and will also present a performance fee of $1000 to the winner of the Best Australian Prize. Visit his website to find out more about his performances.
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Images supplied. Portrait of Hoang by Sharon Gertner Photography.
