★★★★☆ Inspiring stories abound in benefit performance by Hoang Pham.

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne
October 23, 2016

In 1985 a young couple, Hung and Tham, squashed themselves onto a 9-metre boat with others fleeing communist Vietnam. Their son Hoang was a few months old. After being adrift at sea for a month, the family eventually made it to Australia and were settled as refugees. Hung had been a piano teacher in Vietnam, and nurtured his son’s early musical development in their Housing Commission flat in Melbourne. Eventually Hoang was taken on as a pupil by one of Australia’s most phenomenal pianists, Rita Reichman. On the strength of a talent so prodigious that, as a toddler, she could play anything she heard by ear, Rita, her mother, brother and sister were whisked from very modest circumstances in mid-1960s Melbourne by a wealthy New York benefactor; Rita was offered a scholarship at the Juilliard School when she was five. Reichman’s parents were also refugees; her mother Mara’s entire family was executed in the Holocaust. These background commonalities are likely contributors, along with tremendous musical virtuosity, to a bond between teacher and pupil that lasted 17 years.

Pham is passionate about the contribution...