Some stories in the arts are heartwarmers, first and foremost, pure and simple. That can certainly be said of the 2013 ABC Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year, a title bestowed at Melbourne Town Hall. Because this year it went to Hoang Pham, the son of Vietnamese refugees, who has now proved that The Australian Dream (something like The American Dream, but with more poisonous snakes) can come true.
It is a prestigious competition, and one with a fairly impressive roll call of past winners and finalists. Among them are the soprano Emma Matthews, baritone Jonathan Summers, pianist Geoffrey Parsons, violinist Adele Anthony, Shine pianist David Helfgott and pianist Simon Tedeschi.
Hoang Pham, winning aged 27, has already got a number of trophies--the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition, Sydney International Piano Competition, the rather swooningly titled Melbourne Recital Centre Great Romantics Competition. He has studied with Rita Reichman at the Australian National Academy of Music, and afterwards with Marc Silverman at the Manhattan School of Music.
Several subsidiary awards were given out as well. Hoang Phoam also won the Best Chamber Music Performance, for his Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 1. An oboist at the tender age of 14, Andrew Kawai won Best Recital. Violinist Grace Clifford bagged the Best Performance of an Australian Work prize for Soliloquy: a fragment from String Quartet No. 2 by Wilfred Lehmann. Kawai also won the People's Choice prize. He and Stefan Caaomenos both got $75,000 Australian; Hoang, meanwhile, received Australian $25,000.
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