Cellist
Zlatomir Fung
(he is American, of Bulgarian and Chinese background) won the Tchaikovsky International Competition pre-pandemic but had to wait until 2025 for his recording debut with pianist
Richard Fu
; it promptly landed on classical sales charts in the spring of that year. Its success sprang from the fact that
Fung
put the pandemic era to good use, investigating cello-and-piano repertory of the 19th century. This is conventionally thought to be in short supply, but
has changed the situation with a group of operatic fantasies comparable to those for piano and violin, themselves not terribly often played. They are plenty virtuosic, and
handles the technical challenges so well that one doesn't quite even realize they're there, but they are also of interest compositionally. Hear the
Fantaisie sur des motifs de Guillaume Tell de G. Rossini
of
François de George-Hainl
, which, if one was wondering about some of the music, includes a new tune introduced by the composer. Best of all may be the opening
Fantasy on Jen¿fa
,
's own contribution to the literature. This isn't a sequence-of-tunes opera that one would think amenable to this kind of treatment, but
's solutions are artful.
closes with another contemporary work, the
Fantasia Carmèn
Marshall Estrin
, described by the composer as an "opera fantasy about opera fantasies which explores the act of adapting and recontextualizing music from a preexisting work." Listeners may be intrigued by this or find it too meta, but it is not dull. ~ James Manheim