Borletti-Buitoni Trust
BBT Artists
Rewarding Musical Excellence
Zlatomir Fung cello
Fantasies
with Richard Fu piano
Signum Classics SIGCD882 released 25 April 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