Savoring Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto's `glorious golden color'
David Fung will perform with the Vallejo Symphony on Saturday and Sunday at the Empress Theatre
In the pantheon of piano concertos, it's the big one, numero uno: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in Bflat minor, Op. 23. Reputations are made with it. Contests are won with it.
And clearly David Fung, who will perform it Saturday and Sunday with the Vallejo Symphony, knows it's regarded as resumebuilder, if not a bread-andbutter piece, for any serious pianist on the classical music circuit.
To date in his career, the 34-year-old Hong Kong native and New York City resident, called “a rising star” in BBC Music Magazine, has performed it how many times?
“I haven't counted,” he said during a brief interview Tuesday morning from Los Angeles. He paused, adding, “almost 59 times. This (classical music) season alone, seven or eight times.”
Growing up in Australia until age 18 before moving to the United States, Fung, a graduate of the Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles who has released recordings on the Steinway & Sons label, said he first played it at age 12.
“The longest I've gone without playing it is two years,” he added in a voice rounded with a slight Aussie accent. “I love the piece. Its melodies are incredible. The dance themes. The beautiful melodic elements that he's known for,” with signatures of the Russian composer's symphonies, ballets and other concertos audible during its roughly 36-minute course from beginning to end in three movements.
Written in 1874, the work is denoted by treacherous, cascading runs and daring, thunderous octaves, and its immortal opening melody, the source theme to the popular tune “Tonight We Love,” after an arresting horn call.
The theme, which Fung described as a “glorious golden color, like Chopin's `Raindrop' piece,” is at the core of an extended introduction but disappears in the rest of the movement.
“It sort of sets the theme for the whole concerto, but it's never heard again,” noted Fung, who has performed with orchestras ranging from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to San Francisco and is a prize-winner of the Arthur Rubinstein Piano International Masters Competition in Tel Aviv.
Musically, the concerto moves on to a lively, rhythmic melody Tchaikovsky said he heard blind Ukrainian beggars sing, followed by dramatic passages for
the piano.
The second movement is a tender essay augmented
by woodwinds and flute, which Fung, who teaches at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, called “sort of idyllic, pastoral,” punctuated by “a cool rustic dance in the middle of the movement that very unexpectedly comes out of a beautiful, pastoral opening.”
The finale begins with a rushing string figure and a powerful drum stroke, with a main theme boasting the rhythmic energy of a Cossack dance, and develops to another romantic theme, providing contrast.
“A lot of people wait for this movement,” said Fung, adding that his dog, Cooper Cotton, a Goldendoodle, didn't want to wait for an interviewer's questions and was “literally pawing at me” to go for a walk.
Led by conductor Marc Taddei, the weekend concerts will open with “Music for Small Orchestra” by Ruth
Crawford Seeger, whom Symphony spokesman Tim Zumwalt described as “an ultra modernist composer and matriarch of the folkrevival Seeger family,” composing in radically different styles. The piece emerged from her early, avant-garde period in the third decade of the 20th century, but “Rissolty Rossolty,” a polyphonic patchwork of three folk tunes, was composed in 1939 “as a whimsical tribute to the never-ending energy of folk music,” he said.
Closing out the concerts will be Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92, which Wagner called “the apotheosis of dance,” but the 1813 work, which clocks in at about 42 minutes, actually marks the composer's stylistic break from Mozart, Haydn and others who mimicked Classical era composers. The second movement, the allegretto, is frequently performed separately in modern times. The final movement is a heart-pounding series of chords sure to keep anyone awake, even in the last row of any sizable auditorium.