VSO Streams Premiere of Fung’s Flute Concerto

Last night I experienced my first encounter with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (VSO). The occasion was the world premiere of a flute concerto by California composer Vivian Fung, written under lockdown conditions during the second half of last year. The concerto had been commissioned by VSO for the ensemble’s Principal Flute, Christie Reside; and Fung gave it the title “Storm Within.”

As a result the entire concert was entitled Sun and Storm, the “sunny side” beginning the program with Franz Schubert’s D. 485 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major. Having been in Vancouver only once for a computer conference, this was my “first contact” with VSO; and I was impressed with how they were managing under pandemic conditions. That impression was established early in the program with conductor Tania Miller’s approach to Schubert.

From my very first encounter with this symphony when I was in high school, I was struck by how much it reminded me of symphonies by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One could almost assume that someone with “leverage” was disappointed that there were not enough Mozart symphonies and persuaded (pressured) Schubert to write one that would be a “successor” to K. 551, Mozart’s final (“Jupiter”) symphony in C major. The result was a unique symphony in its own right but with more than a few wistful glances back at Mozart’s approach to symphonic composition, along with a few similar glances towards Joseph Haydn.

In that context it was more than a little satisfying to view D. 485 performed with chamber orchestra resources. This allowed all of the string players to be suitably “distanced with the wind players behind them, each “framed” by plexiglass shielding:

screen shot from the video being discussed

With this approach to instrumentation, Miller served up a delightfully wistful reflection on an imaginative nineteenth-century composer reflecting on the past century.

Fung’s concerto, on the other hand, was true to her title from beginning to end. She definitely transcended any pun about the depiction of a storm being relegated to a wind instrument. More significantly, there was no shortage of cadenza passages depicting the elements at their fiercest. For that matter, over the course of a “first contact,” it was often difficult to distinguish those cadenzas from the thematic material, let alone follow the path of that material through the ensemble, as well as the soloist. In this case that ensemble was larger, including more brass and percussion; but there was still a sense of “chamber scale.”

Hopefully, this video will remain available for viewing on its VSO Web page for some time. Fung’s concerto is definitely not the sort of music that one goes to at a concert and leaves thinking, “That was nice. What’s next?” It is music that both deserves and merits multiple listening experiences. Fortunately, the virtual world affords that approach; and we are lucky to be able to take advantage of that affordance.