Enthusiasm for atches of brilliance

By cliveoconnell on July 21, 2026

KEYS TO LIFE

Jayson Gillham & Iyad Sughayer

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Sunday July 19, 2026

Jayson Gillham & Ihad Sughayer

Not too surprisingly, this duo-piano recital by Australian-born Jayson Gillham and Palestinian-Jordanian Ihad Sughayer was close to packed out. Whether that was due to a horde of music-lovers dissatisfied with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s policy on addresses from the stage, or the occasion inspired an alternative crowd of Palestine supporters to come out in support of an artist with links to that country and another who has been penalised for speaking for the hundred-plus Palestinian journalists killed during the first ten months of the war in Gaza, I don’t know. Perhaps Gillham has an unexpectedly large number of Melbourne fans and they showed up simply because their man was in town.

Whatever its origins, this audience was wildly appreciative of everything and anything. A battery of mobile phones were held up across the theatre before the players sat down. Mind you, no prohibitions regarding snaps were mentioned in the leaflet/program and nothing beats having your own vision reinforced for posterity. In several (no, be honest: most) cases, people clapped between movements and went into Federation Square mode at the end, giving a standing ovation after what was a respectable exercise of talent but hardly on a level of flawless delivery as displayed by the Jussen brothers, who will play in this hall next month, or the Labeque sisters (who, though benchmark duo-pianists, admittedly haven’t been back here for thirteen years).

Gillham and Sughayer (who, as far as I can find, have prepared part of this program by playing once, in April, at the Scotland Conservatoire) are indulging in a kind of capital city tour. After Melbourne, they go to Brisbane, where they’re booked in to the Concert Hall at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Then it’s on to Elder Hall at the University of Adelaide, finishing up at the Angel Place Recital Hall in Sydney. As at this moment (July 20), you’ll have no problem getting a seat at any of these venues.

So what are these musicians offering? They begin with Debussy’s Petite Suite of 1889, four movements with qualities that still beguile, like the opening En bateau with its benign first melody, or the clattering Maillotins-reminiscent Ballet. On this night, the pianists utilised the sustaining pedal liberally; well, that’s their privilege as no edition I’ve come across tells you what to do in that regard. Still, the Menuet and Ballet were given with brisk definitions of Moderato and Allegro giusto respectively, to the point where the performers’ congruence suffered in a score where that relationship is not severely tested.

The Petite Suite is written for piano four hands, with Sughayer playing Prima. Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos of 1781 followed, with Gillham taking that role. As usual, the missed notes and timing discrepancies stood out, although both players recovered from the latter pretty quickly. The opening Allegro‘s exposition was repeated and the movement worked towards its resolution competently enough, apart from a short mess just before the re-statement of the second subject in the recapitulation – somewhere in the bars-126-to-135 ferment.

As for the central Andante with its almost breathtaking main melody (except for bars 5 and 6), I believe the pianists repeated its exposition as well, which proved to be a true pleasure, if not as much as their sense of grace in the concluding segment of mirroring that follows bar 106. I would have enjoyed the final Allegro much more if the performers made more of its lightness of touch, as the approach every so often appeared to be bulldozing through the heftier moments when both pianos are engaged in simultaneous semiquaver flurries.

Ravel himself arranged his own 1905 Introduction and Allegro for two pianos and these interpreters made excellent work of the piece’s free-wheeling exhibitionism, Gillham playing the origiunal’s initial flourishes for harp with loads of verve, giving us some fetching glissandi along the score’s path. But you missed the original instrument’s texture, not least when it moves into harmonics at the Tres lent bars in the central cadenza. While it made for an interesting aural experience, I’m afraid the exercise struck me as the sort of thing you subsitute when you can’t assemble the requisite instruments for the piece in its ‘right’ state.

Sughayer is a Khachaturian expert, having recorded the Armenian composer’s complete piano works; that probably includes the early Piano Concerto of 1936 which enjoyed high popularity when I was a student but which I’ve heard in the concert hall only once in the last sixty years. The program began its second half with the Three Pieces for Two Pianos, written in 1945 and sparkling with interest every so often. In the Ostinato, Gillham provided a solid bass line and the upper-level development from Sughayer showed slight traces of Prokofiev.

But the central Romance proved the most intriguing of the triptych, mainly for its freedom of invention and utterance which brought to mind Khachaturian’s lyrical felicity when giving vent to his unapologetic Romantic streak. The Fantastic Waltz sounded like hard work for both musicians who, in the end, had to flog the piece’s central theme to a frenetic pulp.

If the night had a pivot for the politically motivated supporters present, it arrived with Houtaf Khoury‘s Isolated for piano four hands, enjoying its premiere. The Lebanese writer still lives in his homeland, I believe, and he spent almost a decade studying in pre-War (the current one) Kyiv. So he’s been on-site if not actually involved in the two great conflicts of these days. This work, according to a prefatory note read by Gillham, speaks of the composer’s present situation and does so in an attractive language of what I can only call polytonal impressionism.

Khoury avoids tragic overtones but the prevailing atmosphere sounds melancholy, if not depressed. What works in the composer’s favour is his ability to keep a narrative mobile, refreshing itself on a bare-bones opening to come to territory that is more optimistic, as Khoury intended, with an extended passage near the conslusion that recalled the sound of bells ringing – not in jubilation but as reminders of a life-affirming state of existence, beyond the grim position that confronts all in Lebanon today.

What followed Khoury’s piece was, however, the best music on the program. No, it wasn’t the most aspirational or the most inspired, but it was a score brilliantly contrived for two pianos: Arensky’s 1888 Suite No. 1. This comprised a(nother) Romance, a Valse and a Polonaise; all were examples of cross-fertilization and complementarity (as our American cousins say) at its best. The opening piece held melodic content of a fairly ordinary quality but its expression proved both accomnplished and elegant, When it came to the Valse, what impressed was the sophistication of Arensky’s fioriture from both executants, and what I recall of the Polonaise was the infectiousness of the composer’s rhythmic manipulation which – as with every later composer in this form – suggested Chopin, but in this instance without copying him.

At the end of the program came Chabrier’s Espana in yet another two-piano version, arranged like Ravel’s work by the composer and published in 1884. This fell rather flat for me, although the audience was wildly enthusiastic. But it seemed pretty bare-bones, without the vivid orchestral tapestry that the composer created, incapable of offering the timbral variety (embodied in the sparkle of tambourine, cymbals and triangle) that animates what is a rather repetitive jota. For all tbat, the performers brought an unflagging energy to this all-too-well-known masterpiece.

An encore – Ravel’s Le jardin feerique that concludes his Mother Goose Suite of 1910 – finished the night in stately style, the slow move from pianissimo to fortissimo as well controlled as I’ve heard in live performance: gravity without ponderousness. It made for an elevated conclusion to this amiable recital, elongated beyond its scheduled length by the artists’ insistence on speaking to us before every piece presented. Sill, as Gillham has shown in recent years, he is a big-hearted artist, one who is secure in his convictions and in his expert pianism. He’s also lucky to have Sughayer as his colleague – an artist with an equivalent commitment and virtuosity.