David Fung
The Piano: A Journey
from Hubris to Humility

David Fung
The Piano: Evening
Conversations new!

Janaki String Trio
debut
new!

!

One of our missions at Yarlung Records is to record young artists at an early stage in their international concert careers.

• We believe these early recordings are often the most technically proficient and emotionally sincere recordings an artist makes during the span of a long and successful career.

• We also know how important it is for young concert musicians to have high quality recordings available for their concert audiences. In previous eras, major labels fought to record the best young musicians. This kind of interest from a major label is rare in today’s market, and Yarlung Records is taking steps to provide this critical service.

We believe that select late twentieth and early twenty-first century composers can write music as rich and beautiful as the masters of the classical and romantic eras. Note Jason Barabba’s String Trio, and works by David Lefkowitz and Krzysztof Penderecki happily along side Beethoven on the Janaki debut release. Enjoy music by Tan Dun comfortably at home with Mozart, Scarlatti, Rachmaninov and Schumann on David Fung’s new recording, Evening Conversations. We hope you enjoy all of these composers.

There is a distinct breed of recording connoisseur that feels the best-recorded sound comes from the least amount of equipment.  One must use the fewest microphones required to capture the sound, and they must be placed in perfect locations. This is the “less is more,” “minimalist,” or “purist” school. Many microphones, multiple-track mixers, miles of microphone cable can add noise and what audiophiles call a blanket over the sound and over the music. This makes the music seem distant and un-engaging. There are extraordinary recordings made this way. But they are rare, and their engineers walk on water.

In these most recent Yarlung Records releases, I use either one stereo or two mono vacuum tube microphones, which record directly to two tracks (left and right, for stereo playback). For these three albums, the stereo microphone is the legendary AKG C-24, and the two mono microphones are matched Neumann U-47s. I believe that these minimalist recording techniques will give you, the listener, the most transparent sound, the most accurate soundstage and the most life-like ambience of these great artists in a concert hall.

We use customized vacuum tube microphone preamplifiers instead of a mixer, and our custom interconnect cables. I record analog tape and high definition digital audio (in this case 176,000 samples per second and 24 bit depth). Steve Hoffman mastered these CDs directly from the digital media, re-sampled to 44.1 kilohertz and dithered to 16 bits so that you can play them on a modern CD player. We hope you enjoy them!

Janaki String Trio commissioned a new work from Pierre Jalbert scheduled for premiere in March 2008. This follows Alabaster Rounds, commissioned from Andrew Norman, which premiered triumphantly in New York in Carnegie’s Weill Hall in January 2007. You can also hear Jason Barabba’s String Trio, commissioned by Janaki for their Yarlung Records debut album, in live Janaki Trio performances. Look also for Janaki’s Taneyev and Vanhal releases on Naxos Records.

Robert Levi of Positive Feedback Online calls Janaki's debut recording with Yarlung Records "intensely musical and analog-like." John Casler writes "Janaki String Trio is also 'beyond' audiophile quality and standards, in every area."

Congratulate David Fung on his successful debut at the Edinburgh Festival! In The Scotsman, Jan Fairley reviews David "playing the piano like a potter deftly shaping clay on a wheel, you were inside a startling world of pure sound." And in Edinburgh Guide, Jonas Green wrote "David Fung is prodigiously talented. As a pianist he is clearly drawn to the extrovert and fantastic in the virtuoso repertoire, which he plays without apparent difficulty...."

David is currently preparing for his next European concert tour. Referring to David Fung's Evening Conversations under the heading "Best PIANO Recording I have ever heard," AudioCircle writes: "The Piano just sounds like it is as big as the whole room.... And what a performance it is!"

Yarlung Records purchases green energy offsets through Native Energy in our attempt to compensate for the electrical power consumed in our recording and manufacturing operations and for our administration.  

We hope your albums last for ever.  Should you eventually wish to recycle them, GreenDisk can help by recycling your jewel cases and the polycarbonate used in the manufacture of items like CDs and DVDs. 

Yarlung Artists. With the help of a strong founding board of directors including violinist Margaret Batjer, and Special Advisors Harry Bicket, Roberto Diaz, Michala Petri and Ruth Eliel, Yarlung Records producer Bob Attiyeh founded Yarlung Artists in 2006. Yarlung Artists is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the support of young classical musicians as they begin their international concert careers.

Yarlung Artists will record, market and distribute debut albums for young concert artists to help them gain stature and visibility with their audiences, critics and peers. Secondarily, Yarlung Artists will work to facilitate management for these musicians with top firms in New York and in Europe such that these agents can build viable concert careers for Yarlung Artists musicians.

In Princeton Alumni Weekly (April 2007) Kathy Greenwood writes “Concert artists… need quality CDs to sign for audience members after their performances. ‘Without such albums, audiences and critics seem not to take… musicians as seriously,’ says Attiyeh. ‘And it helps the musicians [know they are] legitimate and that they have made it onto the international stage.’”

For more information, please telephone (310) 276-0175 or send an email message to support@yarlungartists.org. Yarlung Artists is a separate organization from Yarlung Records.

Yarlung Records
10920 Wilshire Boulevard
#150-9162
Los Angeles, California 90024
(310) 276-0175
info@yarlungrecords.com

David Fung new!
The Piano:
Evening Conversations
$16.99 + $1.99 S/H*

*For Canada, add $3 per disc.

For orders outside the US and Canada, please email your name and address so we can confirm we are able to ship to your address.

It is with great pleasure that Yarlung Records presents David Fung's second album, Evening Conversations, which we recorded in March, 2006, in Zipper Hall at The Colburn School. It is always rewarding to work with an artist like David, whose musical interpretations are rich and fresh without being eccentric, and always completely sincere.
Bob Attiyeh, producer

"…David Fung performed strongly, showing off velocity, volume, stamina and a wide range of color and mood."
Wayne Lee Gay, The Star Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas

"He did not only dazzle the crowd with his virtuosity … but did not fail to move the audience with his excitement, and lyrical warmth."
Ursula Augustin, Kreis Cochem-Zell, Koblenz, Germany

The eighteenth-century…was an age of conversation. And music, modeled on this principal pastime, was a medium for wit, sentiment, and rhetorical flourish. Mozart's Fantasy and Scarlatti's sonatas, which bracket this recital by David Fung, remind us why the keyboard was considered such an ideal vehicle for a composer's flights of fancy.
…Like Schumann and Scarlatti, Chopin, Mozart, and Rachmaninov before him, Tan Dun was learning to master the secret of the miniature - a compositional form he has likened both to zen calligraphy and to the watercolor: "capturing essences with the minimum of gesture." This is a fitting epigraph for this collection of short pieces, jewels of the composer's craft and worthy tests of a performer's taste and skill.
Christopher Hailey, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

Track Listings
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Janaki String Trio new!
debut
$16.99 + $1.99 S/H*

*For Canada, add $3 per disc.

For orders outside the US and Canada, please email your name and address so we can confirm we are able to ship to your address.

Janaki String Trio brings together three friends and virtuoso musicians whose passion and commitment captivate their audiences as they tackle their music with freshness, energy and maturity. Founded at The Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles in early 2005, the group soon won the 59th Annual Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and in March 2006, the threesome came to national attention as the first string trio ever to win the Concert Artists Guild International Competition. The Trio also garnered the inaugural BMI Foundation Commission Prize.

The Janaki Trio was selected to participate in Canada's Banff Music Festival in June 2006. This honor follows an exciting 2005-06 season, highlighted by performances on such series as Sundays Live at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lagerstrom Chamber Music at Caltech, South Bay Chamber Music Society and the Music Guild Chamber Music Series. Janaki Trio makes its New York recital debut in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in January 2007.

Serena McKinney performs on a Camillus Camilli violin (circa 1742); Katie Kadarauch performs on a Giovanni Grancino viola (circa 1695); and Arnold Choi performs on a Carlo Tononi cello (circa 1725).

Track Listings
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David Fung
The Piano: A Journey
from Hubris to Humility
$16.99 + $1.99 S/H*

*For Canada, add $3 per disc.

For orders outside the US and Canada, please email your name and address so we can confirm we are able to ship to your address.

Yarlung Records recorded this American Debut Album for pianist David Fung in advance of his 2005 world concert tour. Following his celebrated concerts with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, David won the International Klaviersommer Festival Competition in Germany in 2004. And after also capturing the festival's People's Choice Award, David quickly became a young artist in demand around the world.

We recorded this album on June 27th and 28th, 2005 in Herbert Zipper Hall in the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles. David started with the Liszt B-Minor Sonata, and played it straight through in one take.

In his own words, David Fung describes his intention with A Journey from Hubris to Humility: "When making this recording, we wanted to give the listener the experience of a concert performance in a great concert hall, not the surgical "in-your-face" sound one hears so often in new recordings. I hope you feel like you are sitting in the tenth row of magnificent Zipper Hall."

Track Listings
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