Jayson Gillham first crossed paths with Iyad Sughayer at a fundraiser in Manchester in June 2024, where hearing the Palestinian Jordanian pianist perform Mozart stirred a long-held ambition to tackle the legendary composer as a double-act.

“In the back of my mind has always been this idea to do two pianos, and I never really found the right person to do it with,” Gillham tells InReview. “It has to be just right.”

That event, which raised £4000 in support of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, would prove to be a fateful turning point for Gillham.

The Brisbane-born pianist had originally planned to perform a new piece called ‘Witness’ by Australian composer Connor D’Netto, which D’Netto had written especially for Gillham to unveil in Manchester. On his first play-through, however, it resonated so strongly with Gillham that he decided to save it for an upcoming Australian tour instead.

When he did finally play the five-minute piece at a recital in Melbourne on Sunday August 11 2024, he introduced the work by contextualising D’Netto’s decision to dedicate the score “to the journalists of Gaza”. 

Onstage, Gillham noted the over 100 Palestinian journalists reportedly killed by Israeli forces in the previous 10 months, and told the crowd that “a number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets” (as of April 2026, a report by United Nations special rapporteurs placed the number of journalists killed in Gaza at 210).

 “The killing of journalists,” Gillham added, “is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.”

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What followed the concert is now widely reported. The show’s presenter, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, issued an email apologising to attendees for the “offence and distress” caused by the “intrusion of personal political views”, and cancelled Gillham’s next planned appearance alongside the MSO at Melbourne Town Hall the following Thursday.

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The story quickly became one of many high-profile examples – from Khaled Sabsabi to Adelaide Writers’ Week – of Australian arts institutions struggling to reconcile the desire of many artists to voice their feelings on the war in Gaza, with a fraught mix of audience sensitivities, political pressure and precarious funding that underpins the country’s cultural sector.

When InReview speaks with Gillham in early June, he has just spent the past three weeks in a Melbourne courtroom as part of a high-profile Fair Work claim he has brought against the MSO over the events of August 2024. 

The hearings aired new details, from private messages exchanged between MSO executives, to a last-minute bid to reinvite Gillham to perform the second concert – pending “a guarantee of no talking from the stage”.

It also revealed the scale of the backlash, with three complaints following Gillham’s initial onstage comments, while the MSO reportedly received 487 complaints in response to its decision to cancel the second concert.

“I think the day that they tried to invite me back was the most stressful day of my life,” Gillham reflects. 

The case is ongoing – a verdict is not expected to be handed down for weeks, if not months – but Gillham stands by his decision to take legal action.

 “We haven’t seen this kind of silencing with other issues, and we can’t let this become the new norm,” Gillham says. “As much as I’m doing this for me, I’m actually doing it for other artists as well.

“I’m teaching now, and I’ve got young students and I don’t think they want to go into the profession on the basis that you’re not allowed to say anything on stage. It just doesn’t make any sense, and doesn’t fit with the history of music and classical music at all, and it’s quite dangerous.”

In the meantime, Gillham will swap the courtroom for the more familiar terrain of a concert hall, as he embarks on a national tour alongside Sughayer, who Gillham has invited to play his first shows in Australia. In addition to making Gillham’s four-handed Mozart dream come true, the pair will perform works by Debussy, Ravel, Khachaturian, Arensky and Chabrier, and a new commission by Palestinian-Lebanese composer Houtaf Khoury

“I want it to be a really heartwarming occasion,” Gillham says of his collaboration with Sughayer. “I wanted people to come together and just enjoy the music making, and it to be just like a normal concert in a way.

“I’m going back to making music, which is what I’ve always done, and what I love more than anything. And there’s really nothing that I want to do more than this.”

Becoming the subject of a national freedom-of-speech storm, let alone taking on one of his industry’s most prestigious organisations, has also brought challenges outside the courtroom – Keys to Life is the first self-presented, independent tour of Gillham’s career. 

“There’s a lot of risk,” he admits. “I certainly wouldn’t want this to become [the new norm] – that you have to self-present if you want to say any words on the stage. It doesn’t make any sense, but it does give me freedom to tell the stories I want to tell.” 

Whatever the verdict, Gillham says the controversy has brought the message of D’Netto’s piece to a far wider audience than the 156 audience members in that Melbourne recital hall. 

“I had a concert in a retirement village, and somebody requested, ‘Can you play ‘Witness’?’ There was a man there who said, ‘I was a journalist and worked for 20 years in the West Bank’, and another man had a tie with an elephant on it, because he said, ‘It’s about the elephant in the room’.

“It sparked a conversation, and what it did was it made people more aware of the piece and more aware of Palestine and the journalists and what was going on. And I think, in that way, it had more effect.”

 Jayson Gillham and Iyad Sughayer will perform at QPAC’s Concert Hall in Brisbane on July 22, and Elder Hall in Adelaide on July 24 as part of their Keys to Life tour.