Opera Queensland's "Dirty Apple" a critical and artistic success:
"... the production benefits from the leadership of the exceptional young conductor, Dane Lam, and a tight ensemble." (The Australian)
"The orchestra played delicately under Lam’s baton, artfully highlighting the sense of anxiety and invulnerability woven into Henderson’s score, coming to shine best in quiet moments of reflection and solitude, yet also adding brashness where necessary ..." (Joy 94.9 Radio)
"The Conservatorium Orchestra, under Dane Lam, proved to be superb with the handling of Henderson's wonderful score and the entire production is indeed one of the highlights of the Q150 celebrations and the Queensland Music Festival." (ABC Brisbane)
Twins fade to pink but opera hits home
Dirty Apple, a contemporary opera for young people written by Jonathan Henderson with a libretto by Shaun Charles, tackles the phenomenon of cyberspace bullying. It's notable not only because of the complexities of collaboration - involving Opera Queensland, the Queensland Conservatorium, Backbone Youth Arts and Q150 - but because it explores such a thought-provoking and timely theme.
Four year 12 students set up a fake, salacious website on behalf of their "weird" music teacher, Mr Newman, with tragic consequences.
The trajectory of this storyline reveals too much too soon, but it's a convincing show and the ambitious set, with the band onstage, toys with today's electronic communication devices.
In a strong cast, Milica Ilic shines as Emma and the production benefits from the leadership of the exceptional young conductor, Dane Lam, and a tight ensemble. Henderson's mercurial score overuses recitative, but shows evidence of a promising composer.
Gillian Wills
The Australian
Baton Waving in NYC
Young Australian conductor to study at Juilliard
At only 22 years, Dane Lam is one of the most talented young conductor Australia has produced. The Queensland native was recently accepted into New York's prestigious Juilliard School, and plans to begin his studies there in a matter of months. Lam was first introduced to conducting at age 17 through Symphony Services Australia, who noticed his talent and nurtured its development. "This is a major achievement for any young conductor and we are thrilled for Dane," said Justine Bashford, Artist Development Manager for Symphony Services Australia. Lam was one of only four conducting students accepted for the Juilliard conducting course in 2007, turning down another high profile offer from London's Academy of Music. Having already worked with the top Australian orchestra, Lam's New York scholarship will allow him further experience with the world's best orchestras and international conductors. Lam says: "My philosophy is that music is a reflection of life, it affirms it. When you see the really great conductors, you sense they have a real depth of understanding." Lam has consulted some of Australia's top conductors regarding his future, including Simone Young as well at the Queensland Orchestra's artistic adviser, Muhai Tang. He has his sights set on attaining an international directorship in the next ten years, yet is eventually keen to bring his talents back home to Australia. Watch this space.
Limelight, June 2007
On the baton track
Dane Lam will soon be the first Australian to study conducting at New York's Juilliard School, writes Rosemary Sorensen
As one of the world's most distinguished conductors, Vladimir Ashkenazy, prepares at 69 to take up the position of principal conductor and chief adviser with the Sydney Symphony orchestra, a young Brisbane man is setting out on a journey that he hopes may one day lead him to the same, or a similar, position. Dane Lam, at 22 one of the youngest and brightest hopes among the group fostered by Symphony Services Australia's conductor de- velopment program, has passed his first test. He has won a scholarship to New York's Juilliard School for a two-year conducting course.
In experience and years, he's a long way behind other young men who have set out on the same path. For instance Luke Dollman and Benjamin Northey, both of whom studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, or Kynan Johns, who went on to work with Lorin Maazel in London after his debut as a conductor with the Tasmanian Symphony when he was Lam's age.
Lam will be well into his two-year course by the time Ashkenazy arrives in Sydney to begin his three-year contract in January 2009, replacing Gianluigi Gelmetti, who may not have proved as popular as the Sydney Symphony had hoped, but who nevertheless played a part in developing Lam's aspirations.
It was following a mastercourse with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gelmetti, that the music student straight out of high school was summoned by the maestro.
Lam turns on an Italian accent to recount how Gelmetti, without preamble, announced: "You are a very, very lucky young man. Next week you come with me and you conduct at the Opera House."
Whatever it takes to make an orchestra conductor, Gelmetti seemed to think Lam had it.
Christopher Seaman, music director of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in New York and director of Symphony Services Australia's conductor development program, thinks so too. He's been Lam's mentor for the past couple of years, along with the University of Queensland's Gwyn Roberts.
Lam completed his degree at UQ last year with first-class honours, even though he was absent for slabs of time. One of those periods of absence was accounted for by a stint in Siena — the lovely university town in Tuscany, home of Accademia Musicale Chigiana — at Gelmetti's invitation. Seaman and Roberts have encouraged him to keep setting his sights high, and towards the end of last year he began sifting through information to select a conducting course from among the four or five best such courses in the world.
"I can be self-critical and pessimistic," Lam says, "but I set myself the test of auditioning for these courses to see how I measured up against the rest of the world."
Although he admits he would have been devastated if he hadn't been successful at his first try, he was told by his mentors — and kept telling himself — that failure to gain a place the first time would be only a temporary setback, not the end of the world.
He needn't have worried. Lam received offers from the Royal Academy of Music in London as well as the Juilliard School. He accepted the New York place, becoming the first Australian to study conducting there, according to the Juilliard's records.
He was particularly attracted by the course's director of conducting and orchestral studies, the charismatic African-American James DePreist, who put the applicants through a "hellish" two days of interviews and tests.
When DePreist asked the aspiring conductors, "A composer is to an architect as a conductor is to what?", Lam thought of, and rejected, builder, and then settled on engineer. One young woman answered janitor and interior designer, which Lam thought was witty. But his own answer was clearly adequate, as he went through to the next round.
While he was still overseas — in the waiting period between the audition and the phone call he received very early one morning telling him he was one of four successful candidates — the reason he wanted to conduct the great orchestras of the world became clear to him.
"I saw the Berlin Philharmonic [conducted by Simon Rattle] when I was in London just a few weeks ago, and it hit me, what makes a great orchestra," Lam says.
"It's this vitality and it has a lot to do with Simon Rattle. He had even the back deck of the violins on the edge of their seats, and I've never seen that before. Every player was committed.
"I saw the Vienna Philharmonic around the same time, and it just wasn't the same. It was more polished, but with the Berlin, while it wasn't always together, there was this big sound, this intensity, and they took risks. I think any person listening could relate to that, so long as they are given the exposure to it."
It's this exposure to the world's best orchestras that will be the biggest advantage to come out of Lam's scholarship in New York. He consulted Simone Young, Australia's best- known conductor, who is chief conductor with the Philharmoniker Hamburg, as well as Muhai Tang, the Queensland Orchestra's artistic adviser, about the best way forward for a young conductor and both said that the orchestras he was able to listen to, in performance and in rehearsal, were as important as the course he would study.
Lam comes from a family interested in music, but not steeped in it. His parents are teachers who live in an outer Brisbane suburb a short walk from the bush. He's friendly, very unlike the craggily authoritarian character with cascading grey locks and windmilling arms that is the popular stereotype of the great conductor.
He has provided for himself for the past couple of years, while studying in Brisbane, by selling watches at a city store. In his leisure time, he's goalie for his local community soccer team. Conductor is hardly a common career choice for a young man and Lam finds himself having to explain just what it is he does when he meets people in social situations.
"Oh, so what sort of music do you write, then?" is a frequent response. He tells them: "No, I'm the guy up the front with the stick." The next question is often, "So, do the musicians actually look at you?"
To which Lam replies: "They don't look, but they do see." The role of a conductor, he says, is to "unite the musicians with the composer's vision. The conductor is the facilitator, communicating with the audience. Those conductors who go on about historically informed performance and then give these really dry performances, in the end I think there's no real point."
In his essay submission for entry to the Juilliard School, Lam compared the inhumanity — the hedonism and sadism — expressed in the lyrics of popular rap musicians with the "life-affirming spirituality" expressed by composers such as Mahler and Shostakovich.
"It is our responsibility as practitioners of this art form," he wrote, "to continue to make it more accessible to society at large: in short, to transform, transcend and transport listeners and, through the power of music, remind them of what it is to be human."
Lam appears unfazed about the hard work and glamorous excitement of the world that is about to open to him.
"Australians are tenacious," he says, "and I think that coming from this unique place, from the other side of the world, that's a positive.
"My philosophy is that music is a reflection of life, it affirms it. When you see the really great conductors, you sense they have a real depth of understanding.
"I can't have that same gravitas at my age, but that doesn't worry me. You can't manufacture a personality, and an orchestra would sense that anyway. I think that intensity will come with age."
Lam begins his course in New York in August and will spend the time until then trying to raise money to cover living expenses.
He would also love the chance to conduct an orchestra in front of a home-town audience in Brisbane, as friends and family have not had a chance to see him at work.
His goal is to secure a directorship in the next decade, and to have an opportunity to conduct in the best concert halls across the world. But he does want, eventually, a job back home.
"Ideally, I'll come back to Australia," he says. "We do have very good orchestras and it would be great to be part of bringing them to international attention."
The Australian, April 2007
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