Zlatomir Fung on Fantasies

Featuring nineteenth-century fantasies on operas by Donizetti, Rossini and Wagner plus world premiere recordings of a bold, postmodern response to Bizet's Carmen and the cellist's own paraphrase of Janáček's Jenůfa, Zlatomir Fung's debut solo recital on Signum Classics has variously been described as 'a formidable showcase for his phenomenal technique' (Gramophone) and simply 'irresistible' (The Spectator).

During a flying visit to London in the spring, Zlatomir spoke to me about his fascination with the virtuoso cellist-composers of the nineteenth century, how the technical innovations which they introduced in these pieces played out in later concertos for the instrument, the challenges and joys of wrestling with Janáček - and the beloved hobby which requires several of the same skills as performing this demanding programme in recital...

Has opera always been a big part of your musical life?

In all honesty I wouldn’t describe myself as a fully-fledged opera expert just yet! As string-players we don’t necessarily have that much contact with the vocal repertoire, so this project was a nice educational process for me - it really broadened my perspective. My first encounter with any opera was with a youth orchestra in Boston, doing a semi-staged version of Verdi’s Macbeth: half the orchestra did the first two acts, and the other half did the third and fourth! It was such a different kind of experience from the other repertoire we’d been playing. Even on the page it looked so different - all those fermatas meant that we had to follow the conductor much more closely, and of course the music itself is so beautiful. 

I didn’t really get into listening to opera until I went to study cello at Juilliard, where we have the Met on our doorstep. I had seen Falstaff in Boston when I was a teenager but unfortunately there’s not always much opportunity to see operas live in some parts of the US, even in cities.  

Jenůfa isn’t an opera which seems especially easy to paraphrase...What drew you to it, and did it require a different approach to the Italian repertoire which proved so attractive to earlier fantasists?

Part of the challenge was that it’s an opera with a very different vocabulary to the Italian operas, which are so well suited to paraphrase because of the discrete nature of the numbers and the potential for variations. My goal with Jenůfa was not so much to elaborate on the musical ideas, but to create something which would be similar to the experience of listening to the opera itself. My preparation and research was really just about immersing myself in recordings of the piece. Initially I followed along with the libretto to get the idea of the story, but after that I decided to listen in a purely musical sense because that’s how people will experience my arrangement.

I found myself becoming very attached to certain passages, and I was guided by that: rather than sitting down and annotating the score, I’d listen maybe once a week and note down particular transitions and harmonies that I wanted to highlight. Then just before I put pen to paper I thought ‘Maybe there is a way to arrange them in a way that tells the story too’...and it’s a testament to Janáček’s skill as an operatic composer that almost all of the moments I’d noted down for purely musical qualities were also really dramatically significant.  

Could you see yourself giving the fantasy treatment to any contemporary operas in the future?

There’s definitely scope for that, provided the composers are on board with it and happy to grant permission. If a new work comes along which is very highly regarded and lends itself well to this format then I’d love to see what I could do…It would also fulfil the same function as many of the nineteenth-century operatic fantasies: to popularise the music and bring it to a larger audience who might not be able to hear the full opera live.

What set you on the path of exploring this genre: was it a particular piece that’s featured on the album, or perhaps the better-known examples for piano by Liszt and his contemporaries?

I do love those Liszt paraphrases, but what originally drew me to this repertoire was my sheer love of cello technique. I’ve always been fascinated by those nineteenth-century virtuosos who also wrote pedagogical pieces – people like Alfredo Piatti and David Popper, who might not be all that familiar to anyone who isn’t a cellist or a cellophile! But for us they’re important people because they did so much to further the vocabulary of our instrument in the eyes of other composers, and that’s what ultimately allowed the cello to be placed centre-stage in some of the great concertos of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Once I started exploring concert-music by these people, it quickly became apparent that almost all of them had written some kind of operatic paraphrase - which made sense, because the genre was very much in vogue at the time. Of course, there are so many examples for piano or violin, but we got our fair share too if you know where to look for them. Violinists can obviously do things we can’t in terms of technical fireworks, but the reverse is true too - we have the use of our thumb, for one thing!

The first composer who really grabbed me was Adrien-François Servais. He’s well known among cellists for composing a set of caprices that we practise to develop our sixths and bow-strokes, but during the 1850s he also wrote almost two dozen fantasies on some of the most popular operas of the time. I chose his fantasia on Donizetti’s La fille du régiment (probably his most famous example alongside one on The Barber of Seville), where he explores a whole range of possibilities. 

There’s one wonderful variation which is all very high artificial harmonics, another which is about really fast octave work, and a final number which foreshadows a very specific technique that’s deployed in one of the most famous concertos in our repertoire: there’s an extended passage where the cellist plays the octave but also embellishes the bottom note with a triplet, and that same figuration appears in the Dvořák concerto around forty years later…

I’ve no hard evidence that they were connected, but I do like thinking about that relationship…maybe Dvořák knew the Servais fantasy first-hand, maybe he was introduced to the technique by someone who’d played it, or maybe the cellist for whom the concerto was written was familiar with the piece himself and suggested it.

Tell me a little about the genesis of the Carmen Fantasy, which receives its world premiere recording on the album…

It was written by a very close friend of mine called Marshall Estrin, who’s composed quite a few things for me over the years. I’ve been asking him for a Carmen Fantasy for the longest time, because the music is so complete on its own terms: even if you don’t know what’s going on in the story you can just bask in that non-stop series of fantastic melodies. I love Carmen so much, and there’s so much potential there for embellishment on the cello.

Marshall conceived the piece very much as a stage work: he wanted to take the idea of the fantasy and expand the meaning of the term to include the whole experience of the performance itself. I remember him calling me up and asking ‘How do you feel about spoken word…?’, to which my response was ‘Um, I guess I can go along with it?!’ 

The piece is a fantasy in the mind of the performer, which is being witnessed by the audience: the idea is that the cellist is recollecting Carmen and improvising around the melodies, so there are moments where you’re asked to talk to yourself and make facial expressions of displeasure or curiosity. That was quite a challenge for us to adapt for the audio-only version, because there are visual elements which hopefully elicit laughter in live performance!

It's a programme I really enjoy playing live, even though it’s incredibly difficult and demanding – it was hard enough to record, but playing this stuff for seventy minutes straight is a whole different ballgame!

Speaking of games, I gather that chess is a great passion of yours - do you find any common ground between playing chess and playing the cello?

Chess is such a rewarding hobby for me, and I’ve been playing since I was five or six. I played some competitive tournaments as a teenager and really enjoyed the longer games in particular, which would sometimes run for three to four hours. It reminded me of the experience of playing or listening to a concert: shutting your mind off from the worries of the world, focusing on one thing and being fully present with it.

I’m currently organising a chess-themed concert with a cellist-composer friend called Quenton Blache who I met through chess. In December we’ll be playing at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St Louis Missouri, which is one of the biggest chess-clubs in the world – they hold many big tournaments there, and he’s been commissioned to write a work for two cellos which is based on a game of chess. When I was a teenager, I wrote a couple of solo piano pieces inspired by chess-games myself, so I’m really looking forward to it!