From Hong Kong to QC: New music as healing

The annual Icestravaganza was canceled in downtown Davenport last weekend, but a sonic icestravaganza is on a chamber music program Saturday in downtown Davenport.

New York City-based composer Angel Lam is in town (for the first time) to hear her piano quartet, “Secrets and Ice Garden” performed in the QC Symphony “Up Close” concert Saturday, Jan. 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Figge Art Museum Grand Lobby. While that wintry piece was penned over 14 years ago, the 40-something native of Hong Kong will have her new orchestral work (co-commissioned by the QCSO) done here in April 2025.

“Music always has been a spiritual journey for me,” Lam said Friday from the QCSO offices in downtown Davenport. “It’s always a healing place. I am a very spiritual person.”

Primarily a pianist (who first started lessons at 5), Lam earned her doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, her bachelor’s degree with honors from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and is the recipient of the Henry and Lucy Moses full scholarship Artist Diploma from Yale University.

As a composer (she calls herself steeped in folk traditions, and plays the Chinese zither, the guzheng), Lam received three New York Carnegie Hall commissions before the age of 29, including a cello concerto dedicated to Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Spano. She also wrote a classical crossover piece for Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

They toured the work for many years worldwide at numerous prestigious venues, including Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and the Royal Albert Hall in London. Like the immensely popular cellist, Lam is blessedly unpretentious, down to earth, and supremely curious and genre-bending.

“It was so exciting,” she said of working with Ma. “I got to hang out with his group and with him a lot…He is very open; he’s definitely very open to folk music and folk inspirations.”

While in graduate school at Peabody (which she completed in 2009), Lam wrote her “Secrets and Ice Garden,” which has a definite winter theme (the Saturday QCSO program overall is devoted to nature, and a partnership to benefit Living Lands & Waters).

“It’s about nature’s ice sculptures,” she said Friday of the piece for piano, violin, viola and cello, noting impressive ice gardens and sculptures in Japan and China. “They are ice castles and gardens you can walk into. The beauty and majesty of these striking structures inspire this piece.”

Lam incorporates lush strings (plus the plucked pizzicato on strings) and bell-like sounds on piano to reflect the ice in the music. “There are beautiful, bell chime sounds,” she said. “I always want to make something memorable.”

She included “secrets” in the title to draw interest into this frozen, magical world. “It’s just whimsical, like a love story,” Lam said.

Lam has been a composer-in-residence at Yale University Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, where she was commissioned by the Musical Bridge Project to write a new work for superstar pipa virtuoso Wu Man and artistic director Melvin Chen at their festival opening concert. Most recently, she produced, curated and composed a concert program at Merkin Hall of Kaufman Music Center— “Hong Kong Journeys,” co-presented by the 25th anniversary of the city of Hong Kong SAR and HKETO NY.

Supporting female composers

Lam is one of America’s foremost young female composers, selected under the League of American Orchestras and Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. In the 2023-24 season, she was among six women commissioned to write a new work to be performed by five professional American orchestras: the QCSO, Utah Symphony and Opera, Jacksonville Symphony, with the premiere conducted this March by Michael Stern at Kansas City Symphony, with an additional performance by Orchestra Lumos in Stamford, Conn.

Most recently, she is a recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant Award to write and develop her new musical opera in New York City. Lam also was the composer-in-residence at the chamber music series Concert on the Slope at Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, N.Y.

For the Toulmin Foundation, this unprecedented national consortium ensures that new works by women composers, each commissioned by the League, will be infused in orchestra seasons to come, with multiple performances throughout the country.

The QCSO is partnering with Lam for a performance of her new work on its final Masterworks concert next year, April 2025, a year after it was originally scheduled. The piece will have its world premiere by the Kansas City Symphony March 22-24, 2024.

Since its inception in 2014, the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program has seen over 40 women composers benefitting from career development via the EarShot Readings, including 28 receiving commissions.

“We haven’t been given a voice for a long time,” Lam said Friday of female composers (still woefully underrepresented on orchestra programs worldwide). “I think we bring something new to the table. We can contribute more.”

Lam (who has two children, a 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter) was inspired by her father for the commissioned piece — the nine-minute work is called “Please let there be a paradise.”

In January 2021, during the height of the pandemic and a prolonged travel lockdown and quarantine in Asia, her father died unexpectedly (not from COVID) alone in Hong Kong at age 70 (life expectancy there is 85 years). Lam had not seen him since 2018, and in summer 2019, a multi-month-long protest in Hong Kong had made travel difficult.

Tribute to her dad

“My father was my muse,” she wrote in a program note for the new piece. “He grew up in a city where children were encouraged to pursue careers in finance, medicine, and law — careers that ensure status and wealth, yet he encouraged me to pursue something different. He told me not to be afraid to walk a path that no one travels.”

Three years later, Lam still doesn’t know how he died and she remains traumatized and haunted by his passing. “He was super healthy; I can’t let it go.”

“He always presented his best self to me because he wanted to be my hero,” she wrote, noting he always loved the arts and music. “In the months following his death, I had vivid dreams of myself searching for him in another world…there were dark valleys and waters, broken roads… And once, he popped up in front of me in his younger self, like how I remembered him in his prime during my teenage years.

“We hailed a red taxi and caught a ride together. During the ride, he talked excitedly about history, the arts, and astronomies…all those fun things he had loved in his lifetime,” Lam said. “And then, he disappeared again…without saying goodbye. Where is he? Where did he go? Is he happy?”

The title of her new orchestral work is her fervent wish, “Please let there be a paradise,” and for her father to be there. Lam said the piece “is a spiritual journey of mine in search of my father in the underworld.”

“There is a sweeping melody in the piece, depicting the underworld,” she said Friday, adding she paints a “big landscape.”

In another aspect to the healing nature of the new work, Lam included the peaceful, meditative crystal singing bowls, which are heard in the beginning and ending sections of the piece.

“I’m hoping I could visit him that way, really like going to the underworld.”

To learn more about Lam, click HERE. To order tickets to Saturday’s chamber concert, click HERE.