By Pierre Ruhe

For the AJC

Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Angel Lam’s unusual cello concerto will be premiered Thursday in Atlanta’s Symphony Hall by superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, conductor Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Next month they’ll play it again on tour in New York, along with Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale,” an opera set in a fairy-tale China. The program will be part of Carnegie’s prestigious “Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture.”

Lam’s new concerto has a mysterious title, “Awakening from a Disappearing Garden,” and begins not with music, but with a narrator telling a story:

“I took a taxi. It wouldn’t take long to reach this luxurious mansion where I had been invited for a party. A calendar on the dashboard showed in bright red letters, May 10th, 1953. I asked the driver to circle the block again, spending more time, and then had him drop me off a block away. I left the taxi and walked some distance so that no one would see me coming by taxi, and not by limousine....”

Lam is a composer of contradictions. Born in Hong Kong, she was raised in Huntington Beach, Calif., and returned to Hong Kong for college, then came back to the United States for graduate studies. Her family isn’t especially musical, she says, with her mother in finance and her father in the import/export business, selling tropical fish. Yet at the age of 8, she started studying piano and the guzheung, a traditional 21-string Chinese zither. Soon after, she caught the composing bug, even entering her songs in a Hong Kong radio station’s talent contest.

With a charmingly slight lisp in her diction, she’s intensely shy and private in interviews.

She refuses, for example, to divulge her age. As is the norm for living composers, a concert program once gave her birth year followed by a hyphen and a blank space. In classical music, it is standard to list a composer’s life dates — for example, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). But her father was superstitious that the blank space invited death.

“My father is a very typical Chinese man,” says Lam, “and he thought that was the worst thing in the world.”

Yet Lam almost always infuses her music with herself, her dreams, her upbringing, her personal view of life. She even put herself on stage in “Awakening from a Disappearing Garden.” She will be the narrator, reading her two-chapter short story that’s an integral part of the concerto, with cellist Ma and the orchestra accompanying her.

“My piece revolves around a female character, and I noticed that a lot of Chinese literature, even, has a lot of heroines but few heroes. [The concerto] is my own thoughts of China that might have no specific time or place but is my compressed memories.”

Although she decided to put herself in the music, she’s not by nature a performer, and she’s nervous about her big concert hall debut.

For its China festival, Carnegie Hall asked Lam about two years ago for a new concerto for Ma. “I immediately had in mind a woman’s story, told in the style of Chinese tea houses, a very ancient tradition,” she recalls. “I knew I’d have to write the story, yet that I’d have a hard time finding an actress to play it the way I had it in my mind.”

Composer Christopher Theofanidis, her musical mentor at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute of Music and Yale University — two schools where Lam, 29, is now enrolled for graduate degrees — urged her to read the narration herself.

“I feel very courageous putting myself not behind the scenes, where most composers like to stay, but in front of the audience,” she admits. “It’s healthy for a composer to be in direct contact with their audience.”

Lam first worked with Ma on his Silk Road Project, a multi-ethnic music and arts troupe that finds inspiration in the historic trade and culture network that linked the Far East with the Mediterranean world. One of her most compelling works, “Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain,” was recorded by the Silk Road Ensemble. It includes Ma on cello and such exotic instruments as the shakuhachi, a Japanese folk flute. It’s a gorgeous, serene, evocative piece of chamber music, with audible ties to both an Asian aesthetic and the Western classical tradition, fired by her strong musical personality.

Suddenly Lam was on Carnegie Hall’s short list of prized composers to be nurtured, which led her to write three songs in a workshop led by composer Osvaldo Golijov (“Ainadamar”) and soprano Dawn Upshaw. The result: “Sun,” Moon” and “Stars,” on her own poetry.

Golijov, Upshaw, Theofanidis: three major players on America’s contemporary music scene, each with strong links to Spano and the Atlanta Symphony. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Lam’s music would come to Atlanta, even if the idea originated in New York and the principal participants didn’t know what to expect.

Conductor Spano had never played Lam’s music. “What I hear is that she grows tremendously with each new work,” he said shortly after the ASO announced the concerto’s premiere. “That’s exciting to be a part of that evolution, that artistic growth.”

Lam says cellist Ma gave no input for the concerto. “He’s so open to what a composer offers,” she says, “and he’s not trying to shape the creative process. He told me it is his duty as a performer to try his best to play what is written.

“But Yo-Yo and I agreed on one thing before I started: It’s essential to communicate with the audience, and I’m open to make changes [after the Atlanta premiere] to make something more effective.”

Concert preview

World premiere of Angel Lam’s “Awakening from a Disappearing Garden.”

Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. 
8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.