George Xiaoyuan Fu on Solitude With Schubert

The ever-creative and engaging American pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu released his latest album, Solitude With Schubert, on 10th July. It has been received with the warmth and excitement that it deserves, both for his insightful and colourful interpretation of solo repertoire (including Schubert's penultimate sonata) and also for his magical partnership with the Berlin-born Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time chatting with George about the album, and his wider musical passions. 

I’ve found it interesting that the title of the album is Solitude With Schubert, yet it's described as a Schubertiad, which we think of as a social event with Schubert and his friends making music together. 

Well, it works on a few different levels because on the one hand yes, Schubert wrote for a world that was very familiar to him socially. He was very well-known, and a respected composer in Vienna, even though he might not have enjoyed the professional success that he deserved at the time. We all feel that too, but socially amongst amateur musicians he was very loved, and so there is this element of conviviality, and his work has a way of drawing people in. 

Schubert, even at his largest scale, invites you in by the hand: there’s a few very special composers that do this, so that even though you're amongst other people when you're playing or listening, you get the gift of experiencing the same thing together and yet the things that you're experiencing are completely different.

It has a power to touch what is so personal to you while getting to be around other people because it's incredibly intimate music, and you don't have to necessarily say 'isn't that wonderful that this was about my walk or this was about this cat'. These are clumsy examples, but there isn't the need for those sort of logical structures in order to tie it together socially; you can experience something very powerful and intimate together, at the same time.

I really noticed that because I started breaking ground on this programme over lockdown, which was a time of enforced solitude, and it was around that time I got to know Lotte. We did a kind of video project together and she brought the song cycle Einsamkeit. It’s not very well known amongst Schubert's song repertoire, but it's about solitude - a sort of monodrama of what isolation is like. 

I just thought because this project was conceived in that time period, with the solo piano works and then there's also this wonderful song cycle which we really wanted to record together, all these factors were coming into play almost like the layers of an onion, and that's why I thought ultimately of this title Solitude With Schubert. 

Einsamkeit is mostly sung by baritones and tenors, so what difference of perspective do you think Lotte’s mezzo-soprano voice brings? 

In some ways I felt like that's really not up to me. Lotte's voice kind of soars out in the context of the poetry and this idea of crying out for a connection, and so much of Schubert's music is written around poetry about that. I know that was very touching. 

There wasn't a subject matter pitfall, as in some settings where there would be a shift of gender perspective for example. It's actually more philosophical in that way, and so ultimately we just set to work on the musical parameters, and Lotte has got this wonderful quality of being extremely extemporaneous and passionate in her singing but also there's this real meticulousness, and that's the wonderful thing about repertoire from this era. You're coming out into Romanticism and there's that wonderful ‘my cup runneth over’ feeling that comes with it, yet you know Schubert’s structural and compositional mindset is still very much in the Classical world. He's concerned with proportions, things lining up and using all the right tools, and so to marry those two up I think Lotte is so suited to do it. It's very inspiring working with a singer that can inhabit those worlds at the same time. 

Why did you choose D958 out of the late sonatas? 

I studied and played them all at conservatory, but recording is a different matter because in some ways it's throwing it out into the ether, and it's more attached to how you present yourself as an artist. There's a certain responsibility that you have, especially with music like Schubert; it's so well known and I certainly grew up with stellar recordings of it. The one of the late sonatas that I grew up with was by Brendel on Philips, which I just played on the car rides to lessons over and over again.

The truth of the matter is that over lockdown I looked at the G major (D894), the C minor (D958), and  the last one (D960) which I've since played many times, and D958 was the one I was ready to record. 

You know when you're ready, and I didn't feel that I could put my whole conviction behind every note of D960 yet, but I think with this one I could, and it felt so intuitive – that it's time that everyone should hear it and it can be attached to my name.  I definitely hope to be recording more Schubert in the future, because he’s a composer that moves me so, so much and there's something really nice about existing in a world where you have all these recordings that you worship and then you get to put your little album with your name on the spine next to that. I find it such a privilege and such a joy to do that, so I take recording with a lot of responsibility in that way. 

What piano did you record the album on, was it your choice and how much did you work with the piano technician?

In this case I had been tipped off through the grapevine that Peter Donohoe had discovered this wonderful piano out at Wells Cathedral School, so I checked it out and it was amazing - one of the most incredible Steinways I ever played on and also, the timing of it worked out incredibly well because it was during one of the holidays and it just fit. When all the things in life are pointing you in this direction, you just you just go for it, right? 

I work mainly with Steinways and the technician was amazing, and also the sound technician was Oscar Torres who I've worked with on all the projects. He just has such a good sense of what I want to do, and he listens to how I'm playing in the room and sets up his microphones in a particular way to capture the sound I'm creating. 

I think often about gravity in my playing, and how I make a sound that doesn't feel forced. How does it ring out and how do I get the layers of sound all the time? So that's my first priority, and I find that if the sound of the piano is good there's really something to work with.

I read a piece on your Fuharmonic Substack about starting to explore the late Brahms piano pieces. How's that going? 

I will actually play them at some point, but I have a horrifying process where I start playing something and it still feels pretty good for a little bit, and then it's horrible, and then I come back to it and it's good again. At some point I've just got to programme this in a recital, and when you hold your feet to the fire then things end up sounding really good, so I I'm not sure what my next recording topic is, there's a lot of things that I want to record, but at some point I definitely want to record a lot of Brahms.

My favorite composer at the moment is still Schumann. When I first met my wife, my phone background was actually Schumann and she thought that was the nerdiest thing ever. It's a marvel that we stayed together! That world of the Schumanns and Brahms is one I really identify with. 

You played the Schumann Fantasie in your recent Wigmore Hall evening debut.

It was part of my final recital at the Curtis Institute, and I sat with it for a very long time. Talk about 'my cup runneth over' - this is a piece that has everything and then some, and it's a piece that shouldn't work. 

It was first this forlorn almost noveletta kind of thing for Clara, and then he adds in the second movement and the third movement, and then it's for raising funds for the statue for Beethoven, and then he revises the original ending of it, which almost sounded like Billy Joel to me. So, it's gone through all these sorts of crazy things, and actually it's one of the most remarkable things that he accomplished. It's so poetic and you really get the sense that he's a composer that has such a literary focus to him. The music that appears is like the tip of the iceberg and there's all this stuff going on in his mind; he's incredibly omnivorous and inspired, and there's so many feelings that come out. You have to dig into that in order to understand where the work is going because it otherwise doesn't really - I don't want to say it doesn't make sense, but it requires you to put as much into it as Schumann did.

Do you play Kreisleriana?

I adore Kreisleriana. The literary connection there is really interesting, because the piece I was commissioned to write for my Wigmore recital was called The Cat and His Music Master, and that's based on the novel that inspired Kreisleriana.

E.T.A. Hoffmann created this character called Johannes Kreisler, a genius who is very depressive and constantly fears for his own madness but is also prone to episodes of rapture and extemporaneous wonder. In the novel, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, Kreisler's cat has taught himself to read and write. He thinks he's a bit of a genius and he writes his autobiography on the reverse side of Kreisler's diary, so the book is constantly interrupting itself, switching between the cat and Kreisler in an almost postmodern way. That structure was the inspiration behind Kreisleriana, and when I was making sketches for my piece I had my paper on top of all this music. It made me think of the novel, and I just thought, 'I'm the cat!'.