Mozart Album Review in EarRelevant

CD Review: Pianist David Fung shows individualism in Mozart album

By Melinda Bargreen 
March 5, 2020

David Fung, “Mozart Piano Sonatas” (No. 2 in F Major, K280, No .4 in E-flat, K282, No. 5 in G Major, K283 and No. 17 in B-flat, K570.); Steinway & Sons 30107.

If there is a standard path toward piano stardom, David Fung has assuredly not taken it. Growing up in Australia, this musically gifted youngster began violin studies at 5 and piano studies at 8, before deciding to become a doctor. After two years of medical studies, he became the first piano graduate of the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, and then went on to Yale University and the Hannover Hochschule für Musik.

At 22 Fung entered the world of international piano competitions, where he won prizes at both the Queen Elisabeth and Arthur Rubinstein Competitions. (In the latter competition, Fung also was awarded the Chamber Music Prize and the Mozart Prize; the latter is an indication of the gifts he brings to the recording under discussion here.)

Fung’s new Mozart-sonata disc illustrates his individualism in several ways. First is the choice of repertoire: not the “usual subjects” chosen by pianists eager to make a splash, but instead, four sonatas whose charms are not always so obvious on the surface. Fung has chosen No. 5 in G Major (K.283); No. 4 in E-flat Major (K.282); No. 2 in F Major (K.280); and No. 17 in B-flat Major (K.570). These performances of three early sonatas and a later one will reward close and attentive listening, for the quantity and quality of details (some of them daring) that Fung lavishes on each movement.

Take the exuberant Allegro of K.283 (G Major), for instance: the first-movement repeat is different, a little more hesitant and then more boisterous, as if rethinking the first way. There’s lots of variety in Fung’s touch, with lines that sometime seem a little questing, and then a well-judged pause. A repeated theme sounds decidedly jauntier or more assertive than the first time around; there are slight hesitations here and there, but nothing feels manipulated or overly studied. While the performances feel spontaneous, it is evident that a great deal of thought has gone into every line of the music.

The playing, in short, is consistently interesting. Fung has more colors in his musical palette than many Mozarteans can command. The right-hand phrasing is especially eloquent, and his tempi are often quite elastic: surprising the ear by stretching the line just a little here and there in a manner that never seems exaggerated or unnatural. Fung draws a lot of drama from his instrument: silky, dulcet melodic lines become more assertive, even a little edgy, later on.

This also is a pianist who also can let go and have fun, as in the Presto finale of the K.283: the movement has an exuberant gaiety, with stormy passages giving way to playing that sounds good-humored. He can surprise listeners with the occasional “Wait for it!” pause when you’re not expecting one (as in, for instance, the Presto movement of K.280/No. 2). In short: it’s not “Mozart as usual.”

Each of the sonatas has a distinctly different character. The K.282 in E-Flat (No. 4) has an opening Adagio that is serenely contemplative, leisurely, and spacious, with lyrical melodies and a lot of clarity; the sustaining pedal is applied sparingly if at all. There are eloquent little spaces in a reading that is unhurried and explorative.

And, on the other side of the coin, then there’s the K.570 (No. 17) in B-Flat Major. It’s a study in the adroit building and subsiding of dynamics, and limpidly graceful melodies. The third movement – the last track on this recording – leaves the listener with Mozart at his most playful (occasionally rambunctious), and the lively good humor of this interpretation.  

Melinda Bargreen is a Seattle-based composer and music journalist who has been writing for the Seattle Times and other publications for four decades. Her 2015 book, Classical Seattle is published by University of Washington Press. Her 50 Years of Seattle Opera was published by Marquand Books in 2014.

Review of Mozart Album in The Whole Note

Mozart Piano Sonatas

David Fung
Steinway & Sons 30107

By Adam Sherkin

Steinway artist David Fung offers four lesser-known piano sonatas on his new album: the Piano Sonatas No.2 in F Major, K280, No.4 in E-flat, K282, No.5 in G Major, K283 and No.17 in B-flat, K570. Upon first hearing, Fung’s vision of Mozart’s keyboard music is immediately apparent. The (scant) liner notes make much of Fung’s musical upbringing and exposure to the opera – the Mozartian operatic stage in particular – but these references seem status quo and rather obvious in analogy; the comparisons do not quite do justice to Fung’s interpretive approach.

His is a unique and bold reading. Often, contemporaneous interpreters attempt to subdue their own (romantic) leanings, fearing to obscure the ideals of neoclassicalism as manifested in the music of W.A. Mozart. Fung, however, has no such qualms. He portrays a pianistic tableau of striking contrasts, unusual voicings and wanton manipulation of the dimension of time.

Employing a declamatory style, Fung directs the musical action from his keyboard with a strong command of phrasing and rhythmic impetus. He goes far beyond the customary approach to pulsation and accompaniment figures, in search of an inner energy of syncopated beats and subtle ostinati.

Upon repetition of A and B sections, Fung offers fresh takes on voicings that surprise the listener, challenging established conceptions of such material. By far his boldest strokes come in the form of timescale bending: the stretching out of rests, fermati and cadences, as he pushes values to the limit of neoclassical good taste. The resultant effect is generally pleasurable but does, on occasion, turn to parody. Notwithstanding, variety is the spice of life and let’s applaud Fung’s triumph in delivering his singular vision.

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Mozart Album is Boston WCRB's CD of the Week

David Fung’s Nod to His Old Friend Mozart

By WCRB Staff
July 15, 2019

Pianist David Fung makes his Steinway & Sons recording debut with Mozart, whose intimacy and songfulness has been an alluring presence in David’s life for as long as he can remember.

David Fung was intensely musical as a small boy growing up in Australia. After watching one of his brother’s violin lessons, five-year-old David, who’d never played the violin, took hold of the instrument and shocked his family by attacking (with finesse) the very passage his brother was struggling with. David’s violin lessons began then and there. At age eight, he took up the piano, and fell passionately under its spell. In his teens, he found the piano’s magic won out over his love of the violin.

But despite his incredible prowess and competitive success as a young pianist, he chose to follow his brother’s footsteps and become a doctor. It took only a couple of years of medical school to feel the void that came with leaving music behind. He switched gears, moving on to become the first piano graduate of the prestigious Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles. Yale came next. At 22, he won top prizes at the Queen Elisabeth and Arthur Rubinstein Competitions. Now he’s a busy globetrotter with friends in cities around the world. “I have become accustomed to saying hello and good-bye in the same breath,” he says.

Through it all, Fung has had an intense attraction to Mozart. It goes back to his earliest memories of listening to music, when his mother’s career as a singer helped to bring him into Mozart’s lyrical universe. For his debut recording on the Steinway & Sons label, David Fung has chosen a very personal program: three of Mozart’s early piano sonatas, and, as a closer, the penultimate masterpiece – the Piano Sonata No. 17.

There are heartbreaking movements (listen to the Adagio of the 2nd Sonata, track 8) where Fung pulls his phrases from a special silence that is exclusive to the tender world of Mozart. Voices arrive and disappear, in and out of the atmosphere of their circumstances, just as they do in the operas. Fung relishes the art of exploring Mozart’s characters – giving them freedom to breathe, and casting them in darkness and light to help reveal their humanity. All that from music that, at first blush, can seem so simple.

Fung's Mozart Album Featured on WFMT New Releases

David Fung: Mozart Piano Sonatas
New Releases with Lisa Flynn

By Lisa Flynn
July 9, 2019

Even in his youth, the music of Mozart always held mysterious power for pianist David Fung. His teachers made it clear that he certainly should study and learn Mozart’s music, but he was not to perform it publicly. Perhaps these directives only increased Fung’s fascination with the music. In any case, they certainly did not stop him from playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major at the Rubinstein Piano Competition at age 22, where he was awarded the Mozart Prize. For this Steinway recording, Fung selected three early Mozart piano sonatas and one much later sonata, which complements the early works and demonstrates his evolution as a composer.

The Washington Post Review

Subtle, understated, or simply muted? Pianist offers restrained beauty in WPA debut

By Joe Banno

The young Australian pianist David Fung opened his Washington Performing Arts Terrace Theater recital on Saturday with some pretty ravishing Scarlatti. In three sonatas culled from the 550 late-career miniature masterpieces Scarlatti composed, Fung showed a true poetic sensibility. He offered crystalline phrasing that would not have been out of place on the harpsichord — an instrument he also happens to play — while drawing hushed, beautifully rounded tone from his Steinway. Interleaving those works with Scarlatti-inspired sonatas by contemporary composer Samuel Adams (son of John) — which offered witty deconstructions of the Baroque sonatas surrounding them — was a canny bit of programming, and Fung played the newer works with clear affection.

A similar element of poetry informed his exquisitely sculpted readings of Mozart’s Sonata No. 17 and Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasie.” But there was a sense in this music that volume was intentionally subdued, and that the volatility and strutting grandeur that ripple through certain pages of the score were tamed to fit a polite, Classical conception of Schubert’s work, rather than a more robust, Romantic one. Fung’s understated interpretation certainly worked, but other pianists have conjured more edge-of-the-seat thrills in this music, without sacrificing the kind of rapt musing that Fung so memorably drew out in the introspective second section of the piece.

It was hard to predict what a subtle tone-painter like Fung would make of Rachmaninoff. But in the Op. 32 Preludes No. 8 and 10, there was a notable (if not exactly barnstorming) broadening of power and dynamic range. These pieces, too, benefited from Fung’s thoughtfulness and touchingly immediate way with phrasing, and he was fully inside the Russian composer’s idiom. Fung’s own arrangement of Ravel’s “La Valse” (augmenting Ravel’s solo version with material from the two-piano and orchestral versions) was more of a mixed bag — at times more episodic than flowing, at others more concerned with clarity than intoxicating atmosphere. But, more often than not, it was simply gorgeous.

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Review in the Times Union

Albany Symphony's Welcome Look at Mozart

By Joseph Dalton

"The generous dose of opera served to highlight the vocal quality of the piano concertos that followed. David Fung was soloist in the bright and cheerful Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488. The first cadenza felt like a game of cat and mouse, with a chase and teasing turns. His playing was detailed but always understated. Even the flowing scales in the finale came as a single breath of meditative calm."

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Review in Maine Classical Beat

FRANCO CENTER PIANO SERIES OPENS WITH INNOVATIONS

By Christopher Hyde
"One of the most unusual concerts in many a season opened the 12th annual piano series of the Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston Friday night.  Its innovations were matched by the quality of the performances by pianist David Fung and Daniel Moody, countertenor.

The first half of the program was devoted to piano works with unusual (or zero) rhythmic patterns, beginning with the Mozart Sonata No. 5 in G Major, one of the complete Mozart sonata cycle that Fung is compiling for the Steinway “Spiro” high-resolution player piano.

It was followed by “Impressões Seresteiras,” W.374, by Heitor Villa-Lobos, a compilation of “street songs” in 3/4 time, which manages to be avant-garde and nostalgic at the same time.

The “Île de feu, 1” from “Four Studies in Rhythm” by Olivier Messiaen, has no bar lines at all, its rhythm being dictated by the feel of note patterns.  Under Fung’s hands, it was a tour de force of technique, complete with one of the composer’s beloved bird calls (I think it was a blackbird).

Fung, who holds a doctorate from the Yale School of Music, and has taught there, prefaced each work with revelatory remarks.  In describing his arrangement of Ravel’s “La Valse,” he noted that the work has been compared to Poe’s tale, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and occasioned a challenge to Ravel by choreographer Serge Diaghilev, who had commissioned the work.  The duel, apparently, was never fought.

Whatever the work’s history, Fung’s arrangement captures its brooding nature perfectly, in a manner even more virtuosic than the popular two-piano transcription.

After intermission, Fung accompanied countertenor David Moody in works by Dowling, Handel, and contemporary William Bolcom, all which were thoroughly delightful.  Countertenors combine the power of the male voice with the vocal range of a mezzo-soprano.  They were most popular in heroic roles at the time of Purcell, but they seem to be making a welcome comeback nowadays. Moody is one of the best.  He also showed a sense of humor in the very short Bolcom pieces, one of which consists of two lines: “I’ll never forgive you.  For my behavior.”

Fung concluded the program with a brilliant interpretation of Schubert’s great “Wanderer” Fantasy in C Major, D. 760. After this grueling effort - Schubert himself and a hard time with it -Fung managed a spritely encore of a Scarlatti Sonata in D Minor."

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