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At 26, cellist Zlatomir Fung has already established himself as one of the finest musicians of his generation.
In 2019, at 20, he became the youngest artist to win first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition, in the cello division. In 2021, Fung made his recital debut at Carnegie Hall and was lauded by the site Bachtrack "as one of those rare musicians with a Midas touch: he quickly envelopes every score he plays in an almost palpable golden aura.”
An alumnus of Ravinia’s Steans Institute, Fung will make his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut on Aug. 3 at festival’s annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular. The cellist will join the CSO and conductor Laura Jackson in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme in A Major, Op. 33.
The American-born son of two math professors of Bulgarian and Chinese descent, Fung began his education in Oregon, where he started playing the viola and cello in the Suzuki method. After his family moved to Westborough, Massachusetts, he attended the Mill Pond School there and later was home-schooled.
He wasn’t pressured to follow in his elders into academia. “My parents felt that playing an instrument was a good way to foster discipline,” he said in a recent interview. “Now classical music is my passion.”
After his family moved to the Bay State, Fung attended the Mill Pond School in Westborough before being home-schooled. At the Mill Pond School, Fung participated for two years in an elementary string program co-directed by Judy Gerratt and Valerie Clemans. “We knew at a young age that he had extraordinary talent,” Gerratt said. “It has been so exciting to see his career progress.”
Fung went on to graduate from the Juilliard School, where in 2024, he joined the cello faculty
This spring brought Fung’s debut album on Signum Records: “Fantasies,” a collection of opera fantasies and transcriptions for cello and piano, on which he is joined by pianist Richard Fu. The disc features Fung’s own fantasy on Janáček’s Jenůfa and the world premiere recording of Marshall Estrin’s Fantasia Carmèn.
“These fantasies are a grand expression of musical freedom: the freedom to play, to wander, to risk and to evolve,” Fung said. “This feeling of freedom is what I hoped to celebrate most in the selection of works featured on this album.”
His fascination with the opera fantasy arose during the pandemic lockdown, when he encountered frequent examples of the form during his research into the great cellist-composers of the 19th century. The opera fantasy takes recognizable tunes from famous operas and transforms them into a free medley. The transcriptions for cello and piano selected for the album range from fantasies inspired by works from Donizetti and Rossini, to showcase arias from operas by Tchaikovsky and Wagner.
Following in the same tradition as the 19th-century virtuoso cellist-composers he admires, Fung decided to create his own opera fantasy. He was drawn to Jenůfa because of its dark storyline and idiosyncratic musical language, as well as the fact that the opera fantasy, as popularized in the 19th century, fell into obscurity shortly after the time it premiered.
In his liner notes for the album, Fung writes, “My goal was to highlight the music I love most from Jenůfa and arrange it in a way that felt logical and true to the spirit of the opera. During the composition process, I avoided referencing the opera’s plot or libretto, instead searching for moments that I believed would be interesting in purely musical terms.”
Fung decided to approach Marshall Estrin about composing a new fantasy on his own favorite opera, Carmen; there are several well-known Carmen fantasies for violin, and some also exist for cello. But Fung felt that none adequately captured the cello’s potential as a virtuoso instrument.
Fung has premiered several of Estrin’s works, including Kitaroidía for solo cello in 2019 and Cinematheque in 2024. With the Fantasia Carmèn, which receives its world premiere recording on this album, Fung points out that Estrin has written a fantasy “in the tradition of the most outstanding examples of the genre.”
This work is extremely technically demanding for the soloist, and it contains a show-stopping passage that Fung has already performed as a concert encore. Beyond the work’s virtuosity, Fung said, “its more unconventional elements reimagine the notion of the fantasy itself, proving that the genre’s possibilities are far from exhausted — and, indeed, may only be in their infancy.”
Fung is already planning his next recording project. When he is not performing or writing arrangements, he enjoys playing chess and filmmaking. “But the cello is really my place of peace,” he said. “It’s my heart and soul.”
