Young pianist Hoang Pham takes on Tchaikovsky for Canberra Symphony Orchestra

This second concert in Canberra Symphony's 2015 season will start with a BOOM! – Boom-Box, Australian composer Matthew Hindson's exciting work featuring the percussion section of the orchestra.

"You wouldn't believe that this short little overture that I wrote for kindergarten students when I was attached as a composer to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1999 has been played all over the world," Hindson says. "But it's approachable and colourful, lively and loud and will, I think, sound wonderful in Llewellyn Hall."

Hindson wrote his Percussion Concerto for the legendary Dame Evelyn Glennie and has just written for her again: a five minute encore piece called the Accelerating High Hat.

His works have featured in CSO concerts several times including his the Rave and the Nightingale and his Flute Concerto with Virginia Taylor as soloist. "With my music they've always done a wonderful job," he says.

Young pianist Hoang Pham and the CSO's chief conductor and artistic director Nicholas Milton have great mutual regard for each other. "For many years I've been looking for an opportunity to collaborate with Nicholas Milton," Pham says and Milton comments, "... I knew as soon as I heard him play that I wanted to invite him to work with the CSO."

Pham will play a great favourite of the classical piano repertoire: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1.

"This concerto is a masterpiece," Pham says. He talks of the richness and variation of Tchaikovsky's works. "The man had a gift for melody and invention that was second to none and besides the dazzling pianistic writing the concerto has a wonderful balance of material and dramatic content ... It attains a sense of grand adventure and this is why the piece feels so familiar yet so adventurous every time we hear it."

Pham says that there are many ways of looking at the piece: perhaps a barnstorming rendition full of broad and sweeping gestures or maybe a more intimate approach that would also work. "I would like to think that Tchaikovsky's great score has enough scope for both these approaches plus some other things in between!"

The swag of awards that Pham has collected over the past few years indicates that not only is he a technical master of the keyboard but that he has that rare musical insight to be able to offer varied interpretations of many works.

Pham cites three Australian awards as among the most exciting tributes to his talent.

When he had just finished high school in 2005 he won the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition. "It gave me the confidence to move on to the next stage of musical development," he says. He was also helped by the entrepreneurial work of Margaret Farren-Price. "Her vision inspired in me a new way of musical existence beyond just playing concerts. I learned many things from her that opened the pathway towards a new way of being a musician, presenting my own events in the next 10 years and still going now."

At the 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition Pham won the Best Australian Pianist Prize. "To be the top Aussie for that year!" Pham says, "And to be presented on stage at the Sydney Opera House. The profile boost that this award gave me, however subtle, improved my visibility and was very useful."

But perhaps the most special award for Pham was being named the Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year for 2013. "The final was in Melbourne and all my family and friends attended. My teacher, Rita Reichman, who taught me for some 17 years from when I was about four until I went to the US, once told me that 'Time always tells the truth'. The award was like just another touchstone along the way to something beyond."

Pham says that he enjoys all forms of performance – solo, chamber music and with an orchestra. "But I particularly enjoy concerto performances because for somebody like me they remain rare. When something only comes along once in a while you have to cherish those moments."

To end the concert the orchestra will play Rimsky-Korsakov's brilliant musical illustration of the Persian story, Scheherazade, based on One Thousand and One Nights, in which the vizier's daughter beguiles the king by her 1001 stories. He falls in love with her and marries her, sparing her from the death by beheading that had befallen her predecessors. The music is rich and evocative, a fitting finale to an evening of works to demonstrate how the CSO has grown and developed.