Zlatomir Fung - Press

Zlatomir Fung cello
Fantasies
with Richard Fu piano

Signum Classics SIGCD882 released 25 April 2025

I love this gentle opening – no piano to start … The opening of the Fantasy on Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, written and played by cellist Zlatomir Fung with pianist Richard Fu. Sympathetic, emotionally engaged with the opera’s musical moods and, where necessary, impressively virtuosic – especially elsewhere on the album in operatic fantasies on Donizetti, Rossini and Carmen and a couple of straight arias transcribed from Wagner and Tchaikovsky. It’s an impressive solo debut.

Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3 Record Review, 3 May 2025

This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies… Fung has even composed his own fantasy on Jenůfa which you expect will be a parody but actually teases out Janáček’s fevered melancholy rather well.

Richard Bratby, The Spectator, 3 May 2025

Fung’s performance is spectacular… Fung’s own Fantasy on Janáček’s Jenůfa is a triumph, the opera’s idiosyncratic language undiluted. It’s the best thing on the disc and deserves to be a repertoire standard… I enjoyed this disc immensely. Pianist Richard Fu provides athletic, idiomatic support and the recorded sound has depth and warmth.

Graham Rickson, The Arts Desk, 3 May 2025

Fung throws his own hat into the ring with a fifteen-minute potpourri of themes from Janáček’s Jenůfa, showing himself every bit the equal of his nineteenth-century predecessors – not merely a prodigious cello virtuoso but no mean composer either, reapplying those time-honoured techniques to a profoundly different kind of opera.

David Smith, Presto Classical, 25 April 2025

Album of the Week

Norman Lebrecht, The Critic, 9 March 2025

I love artists who attempt the impossible… The American cellist Zlatomir Fung has composed a fantasy on Janáček’s opera Jenůfa, a feat that defies credibility. The tunes and rhythms of Jenůfa are rooted in Czech speech patterns. Erase the voice, and what’s left? An X-ray. Fung and his pianist Richard Fu present fifteen minutes of skeletal examination in which not only the sounds but the tensions of Janáček’s masterpiece are grippingly realised. I can hardly believe that what they have done here is doable. I need to hear it live.

Norman Lebrecht, Lebrecht Weekly/La Scena Musicale, 7 March 2025