Artistic Research with Dr. Sonya Lifschitz

How did your journey from being a pianist to being an artistic researcher take shape and perhaps any key influences or mentors that shaped that direction? I think It's always interesting to hear how you ended up in the university sector as such an incredible musician.

I started as many of us start in a conservatory, studying classical piano in that classical elite tradition and practicing piano.

eight, ten hours a day and working with incredible musicians, incredible pianists.

I went to America to do all my postgraduate studies.

I studied at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore with one of the greatest living piano legends, Leon Fleischer.

So really followed a fairly traditional path of a concert pianist, I guess.

Did my competitions, did my performances with orchestras, played as a chamber musician, played recitals, a lot of Lieder.

So followed, as I said, a fairly traditional path.

I came back to Australia.

And that was a really pivotal moment for me that catalyzed so much of what I'm doing today.

Of course, I started looking around and I started thinking, well, what do I do with my life now that I've got every degree that I could possibly have? And yet my direction was so unclear.

And just playing concerts really didn't feel enough for me.

I've always been a bit of a closeted rebel.

And even when I did my Brahms's and Schubert's and Beethoven's and Bach's, I always felt the need to somehow rebel and do something different and take music in somehow in a different direction.

So when I came back, you asked me about mentors and that was really important.

One of the first people I talked to when I came back to Australia after being away for a long time was Michael Kieran Harvey, one of Australia's greatest pianists and such a champion of Australian music who's commissioned innumerable new works for piano.

And he was a really important mentor for me.

So we had lots of conversations.

Well, what does a pianist do in Australia? And I've always felt that sense of artistic responsibility and that sense of artistic citizenship, which just following that kind of traditional musical past didn't feel that that aligned with those values.

Then he introduced me to John McCackie, who at that time, or maybe still is, I'm not even sure, because I'm now living in Sydney, and that was back in Melbourne.

He ran the Astra Chamber Music Society, which were doing such exciting things.

They were pairing contemporary repertoire with like 15th, 16th century music.

renaissance music and taking over buildings and everything was staged and curated and john for me was an absolute inspiration like i joined his choir even though i can't sing and i'm not really a choral you know performer but i just wanted to basically see how he works and just observe his mind and so that's when i really started getting interested in the curatorial aspect of performance that sense of performance making rather than just playing a concert but Really interesting programming.

Then I met Genevieve Lacey, who was a really important role model.

She was already doing really interesting things, bringing together different disciplines.