Command Performance (from Arabeske, Op. 18)

Consistently good from start to finish, his playing impressed me for its phrasing and musicality. This minute set of pieces is clearly influenced by Debussy and Ravel, but shows surprising originality nonetheless. Whereas the French may have written to evoke oriental music, I find the reverse true with these pieces. They stem from oriental roots, but evoke the impressionism we associate with French music at the beginning of the 20th Century.

His five Rachmaninoff Preludes are a well-chosen consecutive group Op. Add in Chopin's beautiful C-sharp minor Nocturne and Schumann's Arabesque and Kinderszenen, and it is clear that Fung's heart and soul belong in the romantic era. The variety of his touch and articulation is well displayed in this music.

Works on This Recording

Both the opening Mozart and closing Scarlatti have romantic overtones, and I like that. I shall return to this recording many, many times and will watch for future releases from this talented artist. Audiophile Audition CD Recording: Evening Conversations [Yarlung Records] I concur that Fung elicits some exquisite sounds from his Steinway instrument, brilliantly captured by Producer and Recording Engineer Bob Attiyeh.

Anyone familiar with the film classic The Pianist will embrace this performance as authentic. Fung has an immediate grasp of the large gestures in Rachmaninov as well as his tender rhetoric From the outset there were pyrotechnics from the pianist and a similar frenetic sound from the orchestra as in the Gershwin.

Cleveland Classical The Cleveland Orchestra, Blossom Music Festival David Fung, making both his Cleveland Orchestra and Blossom debuts, played the solo part with Apollonian clarity and understatement sometimes vanishing momentarily into the orchestral texture. His expressive playing in the Andante was everything you could wish for, and the concluding Rondo was charming and buoyant.

He finally returned to the Steinway for a dashing, infectious encore: In the first movement, Fung rivaled the orchestra in sound and sonority. Wigmore Hall, London, No surprises here in one sense: Christian Gerhaher has a well-nigh perfect combination of vocal beauty and verbal intelligence. His longstanding partnership with Gerold Huber is clearly a meeting of minds and sensibilities; indeed, there were times when I felt I was almost hearing a single musical voice as opposed to two partners.

Gerhaher and Huber opened their recital with seven songs from Myrten. The two Thomas Moore songs translated by Freiligrath benefited from telling rubato, in perfect tandem with verbal stresses. How the dissonances told, again quite without exaggeration; the overriding impression was of painful beauty. This was the ebullience of an intellectual who wanted the forest, but would never quite be at home there. However, all was not beauty, or not straightforwardly so: The rest of the second half was devoted to the twelve Kerner songs of op.

The ardent quality to the final stanza proved heart-stopping. Weckt mich ein Engel nur. Mail will not be published.

BENJAMIN GROSVENOR

Apocryphal or not more on that later , the elements of this tale are still very much with us. Of course, we also know the clever cantor who helped Count von Keyserling grapple with insomnia so long ago. It was Johann Sebastian Bach. And here we are in Spokane, marking the start of the Northwest Bach Festival, led by Music Director Zuill Bailey, fresh off winning a Grammy for his solo cello playing. It's a fair time to ask what it is about Bach that still has us listening.

Listeners tend to be mostly dumbfounded by it — a "Rubik's Cube of invention and architecture," as one recent admirer put it. Filled with ever-varying melodies and musical canons, all referencing a simple, central aria, it's like music spit out of some elegant supercomputer.

Except that it was the product of one man's imagination. Oddly enough, after his death in , Bach's music initially only lived on via his family — a brood of accomplished players. He was laid to rest in an unmarked grave for almost years. Matthew Passio n in Berlin, and the Bach legacy was secure.

In the late s, acclaimed cellist Pablo Casals fulfilled a dream to record some sheet music he had bought in a Barcelona antique shop when he was The recordings were a sensation, launching a Bach revival that powered right on through to the creation of Spokane's Connoisseur Concerts and the Northwest Bach Festival in the s. Later, Stefan Kozinski, associate conductor of the Spokane Symphony, became musical director. He brought a more modern sensibility to the festival, recalls Gertrude Harvey, executive director of Connoisseur Concerts, which produces the Bach Festival.

Maestro Gunther Schuller had a connection to the Spokane Symphony and the Festival at Sandpoint around the same time, "and we decided to see if he was interested," she says. Schuller commuted to Spokane from his Newton, Massachusetts, home for the festival from to , recreating Bach with his originalist sensibilities. But Schuller's long, illustrious career was coming to an end; travel was becoming difficult. Harvey knew a transition was looming, but never quite got around to acting on it.

Schuller, on principle, did not want to meddle in the recruitment of his replacement. It was going to take a little bit of that Bach magic to find a path forward. Schuller said there was a cellist he had just seen perform — one Zuill Bailey. In June of , after 89 years living one of the great American musical lives, Schuller passed away. Without meaning to, one of his final performances was to recruit Bailey to replace him. As the son of two music educators in Northern Virginia, Bailey's career arc may have been already in the stars.

But the speed with which he picked it all up surprised even his parents. My parents never had to ask me to practice. They had to ask me to stop. In fact, he started at age 4 with the Suzuki Method, which mimics the way young kids can learn new languages.

The Wallis | BENJAMIN GROSVENOR

It made me feel safe. It gave me the tools to feel comfortable expressing myself. The year was big for the young Bailey, as "that's the year when [Mstislav] Rostropovich — arguably the greatest cellist who ever lived — became director of the National Symphony. We kind of turned into cello mecca at that point.

What followed was 25 years as a traveling soloist, going wherever the gigs took him — from plane to plane, his cello stowed in the seat next to him. He was living the dream every young musician imagines during those long hours of practice.

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And he's played some epic venues: But there's a price to all that travel, and slowly it dawned on him that he wanted something different. These posts give him the chance to stay put for weeks at a time, and although he has been offered similar posts in other cities, when the opportunity to lead the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane came up, "I immediately said yes. And the moment I met Gertrude, there was a synergy that was rare. Instinct is important; it just felt like home. Zuill's goal is to have a long-term relationship here and really shape the festival into his vision.

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Bailey is already bringing that horizon closer; he's performing and programming here not only during the Bach Festival, but for concert series in July, August and December. He's also a fabulous musician, just a joy to play music with. Bailey's style is very personable and that makes him a little different — perhaps not exactly what you've experienced in a concert hall before.

It's who he is, but it's also reflective of the sensibilities of the cadre of classical musicians now coming into their own. So you can walk away, or you can do what kids do and rebel — 'No, we're going to turn this around.

Arabeske, Op.18 (Schumann, Robert)

We're going to do outreach on our own terms. My wife, Anne, is on the Connoisseur Concerts board, and we've experienced many musical highs with Bailey front and center, eyes still closed, or telling a funny story about an eccentric composer you've never heard of. We've talked about everything from the comparative benefits of male versus female horsetail hair in bows there's a difference to our boys — we have three, and he has two, with the artist Margarita Cabrera, whom he was married to until Sure, it's intimidating that he plays a cello made when Bach was a child a Gofriller , that he looks like an international man of mystery the hair, the dapper suits and the name "Zuill," well, that's just not fair.

Despite all that, he's humble — very much the son of two teachers, with a soft spot for that kid out there maybe sitting on a stack of phone books who needs to connect to music. Back to old Count von Keyserling: I took some license with that story, building on the original from Forkel in and layering on some of the historical record. But the point of the story is to draw a line from all the way back in to the here and now.

We're still celebrating this man and his genius, across centuries and continents.