George Fu is a natural colourist as a player and composer, and this was immediately in evidence at the start of his recent Wigmore Hall recital. In the renownedly precise acoustic of this hall his performance of Messiaen’s punning ‘Le Loriot’, from his catalogue of bird song, found delectable gradations of touch and tone. There was an evocative contrast between the deep chordal progressions that frame this work, hinting perhaps at the depths of the forest where this shy bird is naturally found, and the varied chatter and clatter in the higher registers. Similar sensitivity of touch was on offer in Chopin’s 4th Scherzo, where the lyrical sections stood out for their finely-layered expression of feeling. In the virtuosic parts there was perhaps too much pedal for the cascades of notes to fully register. It felt sometimes, particularly towards the end, as though Chopin were being filtered through Debussy, and while there are advantages in seeing this music through an impressionistic lens, there is a loss of structural definition and focus too, which does not serve the music so well.
If Beethoven’s piano sonatas were the Alps, then the culminating trio of Opus 109-111 would be the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau. The first half concluded with an impressive ascent of Opus 109. In a brief introduction Fu described this piece as ‘untethered music’. His approach certainly captured its improvisatory quality, whether in the quirky contrasts of mood in the opening movement, the ornery fugal episodes, or the unpredictable twists and turns of the second movement’s prestissimo march. The highly contrasted variations on the seraphic theme of the last movement moved through the gears persuasively, and the final return to that choral-like theme, over gently susurrating trills, was achieved with sensitivity and the right sense of hushed inevitability.
The second half was given over first to his own composition, ‘The Cat and his Master’, and secondly to Schumann’s epic ‘Fantasy in C. ‘ The former bore some comparison with the Messiaen that had gone before, with ambiguous chordal writing contrasting with a brilliantly crazy top register. Emerging smudgily through these textures were the insistent dotted rythyms of Schumann’s ‘Kreisleriana’, an echo in sound of the circumstances of the work’s composition, as the ink of one edition seeped through onto the music manuscript paper that lay on top of it – a palimpsest in sound.
The ‘Fantasy in C’, with its apparently seamless ebbs and flows and quicksilver changes of mood, suits Fu’s artistic personality. It allows the pianist to relish and live in the moment rather than reflect on the larger structures of the piece. For all of their later antagonism, it the work of Schumann’s that perhaps comes closest to the imaginative world and brilliant surface effects of Franz Liszt, who was its dedicatee. Correspondingly, it is a work with fearsome technical challenges, particularly in the coda of the second movement, which bucks many distinguished riders. Fu just about stayed in the saddle, before developing some lovely sequences of playing in the dreamy textures of the final movement. Here the wash of sound he created was entirely apposite to the music, especially in the finely judged key shifts of the last few minutes where you really did feel that you were looking ‘through magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.’
As an encore, a well-judged Schubert miniature continued this magical mood of minor to major sideslips, and provided a suitable segue to Fu’s latest Schubert recording.
George Xiaoyuan Fu
13 July 2026
2 hrs with interval
Photo Credit: Raphael Neal