Piano Diary
Andrea Lam, piano
ABC Classics ABCLO114
Five stars
By Michael Morton-Evans
Anyone who watched the fabulous ABC TV show The Piano will know two things about Australian pianist Andrea Lam, firstly that she is a ‘gun pianist’ (defined by Wikipedia one whose fast, rhythmic style of playing … mimics the rapid fire of a gun) and secondly that she is a sentimentalist. The piano is where Andrea finds outlet for her emotions and her Piano Diary CD just released by ABC Classics is a beautiful mixture of the variety of emotional events she has experienced in her relatively short life, from saying goodbye to her dying grandfather with Brahms’s Intermezzo in A major, which she played to him over the phone while on a concert tour in the US to the sublime beauty of JS Bach’s ‘Aria’ from the Goldberg Variations. We know that Andrea can play the most complex music with astonishing speed and precision, but this Diary presents her in more of a reflective mood, although she kicks off with Earl Wild’s crazy ‘Etude No 6’, which he based on George Gershwin’s ‘I got rhythm’. That’s about as whirlwind as this collection gets, though Australian composer Melody Eötvös’s ‘Bachram’, a world premiere recording on this CD, stirs up a bit of a storm halfway through. Andrea’s favourites are most of ours as well, with Chopin’s ‘Nocturne in C sharp minor’, Clara Schumann’s ‘Romanze’, and Franz Schubert’s ‘Impromptu in G flat major’ all on the playlist. If you can’t play them yourself and want a way of dealing with your emotions at any particular time you can do no better than put on Andrea’s Piano Diary and let her play for you.