Review by Simon Jenner, April 30th 2025
Kenny Fu brings an all-Chopin recital to St Nicholas. From his early Wigmore Hall debt to a Sir Elton John recital he’s shown his dramatic heft and delicate terracing of Chopin’s poetry in an all-encompassing technique that never eschews tumult when it’s needed or extreme pppps when called for. But his style is essentially direct. The Mazurkas in particular benefit from his command of both folk rhythms and clean projection. They’re never wishful till they have to be.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
Beginning with the Ballade No.2 in F Op 38, which starts deceptively quietly, Fu shows how Chopin interrupts this idyllic pastoral of Polish girls (hence the F major, the key of pastoral) by a terrible slaughter by Russian soldiers in the 1830 Polish uprising. It’s thrilling and disturbing, heightening the dynamic tensions and the abrupt shifts in tone: it’s almost cinematic and Fu doesn’t flinch from those abrupt moments, but infuses the whole with elements of foreboding in the lyric, with a hint of rubato darkening like thunder, and in the most savage passages, a poetry recalled. Fu’s structured his recital cleverly: we return to the 1830 revolution, no longer reflected in anger, but in the heat of the days itself.
The nocturne in Flat major Op 27/2 is curiously moonlit as in re exactly analogous Beethoven Sonata also Op 27/2. Here though the work is wholly rapt from the first it’s to the last ecstatic glissando and top ping of the climax, one of the subtlest climaxes in Chopin, or anywhere else.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
The Scherzo No 2 in B flat minor is anything but jokey, the core meaning of Scherzo. It opens with a dramatic call to attention more often seen in a Polonaise then proceeds in almost Ballade-like paragraphs with dramatic interjections, probing interrogatory, inconsolable and abrupt. There’s a savage dark laughter in this and Fu expresses it perfectly.
The Mazurkas in C minor Op 56/3 is a tenebrous later piece that truly shades the genre to a memory of folk. Fu is at home here in the shadowed regrets and direct rhythms. He never sentimentalizes a genre where Chopin was at his most experimental yet also folk-indebted. He could though play here unlike anywhere else.
The Andante Spinato and Grand Polonaise Brilliante Op 22 is a virtuoso salon piece invoking the strut of the Polonaise and it’s aristocratic dance idiom after a call to arms with the Andante, in itself confident and almost bullish. Fu makes of this a more dramatic, turbulent work than I’ve heard and lends it further heft and depths. It moves out from the drawing toon and somewhere deep into the woods. Nevertheless it ends in a thrilling display, all bravura and tyro, swept along by Fu.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
The Etude in D minor Op 10/12 is often cited as ‘The Revolutionary’ written by Chopin in response to the 1830 Polish Revolution taking us back to the Ballade. Only this was written in as the rising unfolded. Heroic but not a Polonaise strut, it’s dark with foreboding but thrilling in its defiance. Chopin was the first to personalize the Etude and take it somewhere wholly other than its roots.
Fu thrills and teaches for climaxes but also underpins the struggle with shades second subjects. Superb, something of world class Chopin here.
Photo Credit Simon Jenner
Photo Credit Simon Jenner