Underrated Classical Musicians: Fou Ts'ong

Fou Ts'ong, the Chinese pianist seemingly known only to other pianists, died yesterday in his mid-eighties. Neither Mao nor Chiang could kill him, but COVID did...

Fou's biography is as much a map of the 20th century as any artist. Richter and Gilels, Ancerl and Kubelik, Shostakovich and Hartmann, Haas and Ullmann, Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya and Kozlovsky and Reizen, Stravinsky and Bartok, Oistrakh and Milstein, Schnabel and Serkin, Szigeti and Huberman, Mravinsky and Golovanov, Kleiber and Busch and Klemperer, Schoenberg and Berg, and so many more, even Nazi collaborators like Flagstad and Schwarzkopf and Furtwangler and Karajan and Bohm and Fischer and Gieseking, they are all more than merely musicians, they are giants, for good or ill, who lived the experience of that century's horrors in the music they made, and through their intensity of commitment through the worst of humanity, the sometimes bourgeois-and trivial-seeming music of the 19th century attained a power it probably never did when first performed. One might imagine that as American tragedy increases and the best music of the popular tradition attains classical status, the intensity of American performances will increase similarly. This is particularly why it's such a misnomer to try to recapture the music of an era that no longer exists because how could the music ever exceed the intensity of the documentary evidence we have of when that musicmaking was most needed?

We in the West don't have nearly the same cultural map of China, but in Fou Ts'ong, we have a bit of it's record. HIs parents were highly distinguished academics ordered to hang themselves amid Mao's Cultural Revolution. He was the first Chinese pianist to ever play in a Western piano competition, and at great personal risk defected first to Poland and then to England.

He never had the career of so many others, but listen, that same unmistakable coruscating intensity is there in his musicmaking which makes you realize that however he came to it, this is an artist of the deepest purpose who brings us straight to permanent essence. The Chopin Preludes, played by every professional pianist since the day they were published, rarely sound this substantial. Of course his tone can sing with the best when required, but singing is only one component on display here. There's the dryness of flint in it, a lack of pedal, an intensity of attack at the keyboard that, without banging, is utterly percussive. It's positively ferocious at times, passion interwoven with discipline, one might imagine this is the way Rudolf Serkin would play Chopin. It is entirely an atypical way to play Chopin, but divorces Chopin from the saloon to give us the catharsis we need. This is Chopin that speaks to our suffering and darkness, and moves profoundly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZdIILY7uVs&fbclid=IwAR141Wz0aZoMGIGbWzQ31anzp_CQIsIAlNcK5qSiFC-Ohtb5hnqrF-ZhX8E