Kam's Craft Continues To Impress

The Age

Wednesday February 28, 2007

CLIVE O'CONNELL

MUSIC REVIEW: RIGG BEQUEST RECITAL 4: MATTHEW KAM, Rippon Lea Ballroom, February 26

BACK in Melbourne for a brief visit, Matthew Kam presented the latest Rigg Bequest recital, once again illustrating how his interpretative skills have moved onwards and upwards over the past two years. Since his win in the 2004 Australian National Piano Award, Kam has been studying at Britain's Royal Northern College of Music and making a considerable mark there, if prizes and scholarships awarded to him are any guide.

To a packed ballroom at Rippon Lea, Kam began with a work that impressed the Shepparton adjudicators and audience: Rautavaara's Sonata No. 2 from 1970, the Fire Sermon, which gives a Finnish response to 20th-century pianistic techniques popularised from Ives to Boulez, like using the forearm and summoning up gratingly loud dynamics; all of which Kam realised with commitment and a commendable lack of theatrics.

Having put the evening's most confronting music at the head of his program, the pianist then moved into calmer waters with a firmly unsentimental reading of Faure's Barcarolle in G Flat before exhibiting his technical prowess in two of the Ravel Miroirs.

After a finely phrased depiction of Oiseaux tristes, Kam went for a rapid interpretation of the Alborada del gracioso, handled with plenty of dash and excitement, but probably too urgent in its hurtling through the outer pages to find the composer's wry humour and jauntiness.

After the interval, Kam moved into even more traditional piano repertoire. First came Mozart's second-last sonata, that in B Flat, which tested his evenness of delivery in its first movement but found out a clear responsiveness in the central Adagio, handled with care and a fluid pulse that complemented this musician's elegant depiction of the first Ravel piece.

To end, we heard the massive Variations and Fugue on a theme of Handel by Brahms, a searching test for any performer's skills and stamina, even in its quieter pages. Kam got off to a poor start but fortunately nearly every one of the variations involves repeats; his recovery was swift and he gave an involving account, well in control of the furious chord-rich faster variations as of the fugue that shows the composer at his most intransigent with lines piling on top of each other in a contrapuntal knot that drains both executant and audience.

Hearing it at close quarters gave us a remarkable exposure to Kam's craft, which impresses every time he returns to delight his many local admirers.

© 2007 The Age

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