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Buy it on Amazon.
Let’s get it out of the way right at the beginning: Francisco Fullana is adorable.
More to the point, as Gustavo Dudamel says, he’s “an amazing talent.”
Fullana is 27. At 25, he was named principal violinist of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He recently won an Avery Fisher Career Grant. And he’s just released his first recording.
“Through the Lens of Time” does what Fullana likes best: taking the old and spinning it into something new. Start with Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” a staple of hotel lobbies and Classical Music’s Greatest Hits. “It was one of the few cassettes that my family would play in the car when I was a young boy,” Fullana recalls. Max Richter reworked it, Fullana responded to its energy, and it became the first track of this much anticipated recording. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP download, click here.]
In the video, Fullana gets rock-star treatment. It’s almost comical:
He’s a critic’s darling. Here’s a typical review:
He played brilliantly, channeling Vivaldi’s fiery scales, fluidly shifting to near vibrato-less lyricism in slow movements, retaining the often-exaggerated seriousness and whimsy that Richter infused. Izcaray and the orchestra responded like partners, not accompanists, to its shimmering sustained tones and subtly enhanced orchestration.
Of course he’s a prodigy. His family moved to Madrid when he was 11 so he could have been teachers. At 16, he was in New York, at Juilliard. He was loaned precious violins. And off he went to tour. His seriousness often fails him; he’s not nearly grown up.
Here’s his tour schedule. At some point, he’ll be playing near you. I suggest you see him before he’s outrageously famous.
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This article originally appeared on The Head Butler
Photo: Getty Images
