George Xiaoyuan Fu: Mirrors
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: George Xiaoyuan Fu
Genre:
Instrumental
Label: Platoon
Magazine Review Date: 01/2023
Media Format: Download
Media Runtime: 54
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: PLAT15459

Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Clear and Cold |
Timo Andres, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
Étude No 5, ‘Toccata’ |
Unsuk Chin, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
(3) Préludes, Movement: Le jeu des contraires (1988) |
Henri Dutilleux, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
(24) Preludes, Movement: G, Op. 32/5 |
Sergey Rachmaninov, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
Miroirs |
Maurice Ravel, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
Pastorale |
Germaine Tailleferre, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
Bad Habit |
Germaine Tailleferre, Composer
George Xiaoyuan Fu, Composer |
Author: Jed Distler
It is very much the fashion for young pianists to record multi-movement suites by a single composer and intersperse pieces by other composers. As it happens, musicality and intelligence govern George Xiaoyuan Fu’s programming agenda, resulting in a genuinely interesting rather than gimmicky playlist.
Ravel’s plaintive ‘Oiseaux tristes’, for example, assiduously slips into the third of Dutilleux’s piano preludes. The following piece, Freya Waley-Cohen’s Bad Habit, contains aphoristic high-register chords that mirror those of Ravel’s ‘Noctuelles’. Likewise, the fragmentary yet sweeping gestures in Timo Andres’s Clear and Cold set the stage for the longer arpeggiated paragraphs of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, while the pointillistic repeated notes throughout Unsuk Chin’s Toccata presage the right hand’s celebrated rapid repeated notes in ‘Alborada del gracioso’.
The main motifs of ‘Alborada’ somehow relate to the slower, gentler themes of Tailleferre’s Pastorale, which actually functions as a bridge into Ravel’s sparsely evocative ‘La vallée des cloches’. The latter’s shimmering mood continues with more melodic immediacy in the closing Rachmaninov G major Prelude, Op 32 No 5.
Fu seems most interpretatively and emotionally at home in the Dutilleux, Waley-Cohen, Andres and Chin pieces. There are more sensual and supple renditions of Miroirs’ odd-numbered movements and the Rachmaninov Prelude to be had, while the icy runs of ‘Alborada’ are more steel clicking than heel-clicking. Still, Fu’s precise fingerwork cannot be faulted, and his gift for programme-building deserves serious attention.
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