By MARK MORRIS, EDMONTON JOURNAL
EDMONTON – It is a measure of the multicultural reach of our city that Edmonton’s leading younger composer was born here in 1975 to Chinese émigrés, who were themselves born in Vietnam and married in Hong Kong. Her name is Vivian Fung and she now lives in San Francisco after a spell in New York.
Edmonton-born composer Vivian Fung, now enjoying an international career from her home in San Francisco. (EDMONTON JOURNAL)
I got the chance to meet Fung recently in the company of another young Edmonton composer of Chinese ethnicity, Alissa Cheung, who has been a violinist with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra but is herself about to leave on a new venture.
Both are passionate about their dedication to their art: “Composing,” says Fung, “is as much a discipline as any other. I do it every day I can.” Both also emanate a kind of certainty in what they do, Fung in an ebullient way (like her music), Cheung more laconic, as befits someone who prefers to be pushing boundaries.
Neither particularly feels any connection to the almost inevitable label ‘Chinese-origin woman composer.’
“I was brought up in the Western culture and music,” points out Cheung, while Fung says simply, “I just feel I am a composer.”
Just a composer, maybe, but Fung began playing the piano at the age of four, and studied composition first with that doyenne of woman composers, Edmonton’s Violet Archer, before graduating from New York’s Julliard School in 2002.
Fung came to wider notice with her Violin Concerto No. 1 (2011), which won the 2013 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year, after Naxos released a CD of her music in the series Canadian Classics.
That CD is probably the best place for anyone to discover her music. Her style is bold, sometimes aggressive, always self-confident, and contemporary without being overtly so. There is almost always a tonal feel to her harmonies. She revels in larger orchestral sounds, and the Violin Concerto has some awesome solo writing (brilliantly played on the CD by Kristin Lee).
The Piano Concerto (2009) on the same CD is more abrasive, with equally virtuoso, sometimes martial and percussive writing for the soloist, alternating with more delicate, gossamer passages. Both works were influenced by her discovery of Balinese Gamelan music, and other Eastern influences have crept in — the Vietnamese bird whistles, for example, in the opening to the Piano Concerto.
Read the full article HERE.
