Leslie Tung - Theme and Variations - Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn for Fortepiano (2019)

Composer Jan Swafford has written that variation form was '...an ideal learning exercise for a student, because it amounts to studying a fundamental element of what composition is аbout: taking a piece of material, an idea, and transforming it into new passages that share an underlying essence but sound different. So a student learns that an essential part of composing is a matter of contrast and diversity founded on unity and invention: fashioning many things from one thing.' In the hands of master composers, variation form was transformed from a student exercise to a projection of individual musical personality through compositional and instrumental virtuosity, and a display of how the lessons of unity and diversity could also be molded into an overarching dramatic architecture.

Pianist Leslie Tung has been recitalist at the First International Festival and Conference on Fortepiano in Antwerp, the Michigan MozartFest, the Connecticut Early Music Festival, Festival Indianapolis and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. He has also been soloist with the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival orchestra and Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and a duo pianist with his wife, Silvia Roederer, at the Carinthian Summer Festival in Austria and at the Conservatories of Music at Beijing and Shanghai in China. In addition, Tung has been guest artist at more than 40 colleges and universities, most recently at the Conservatoire National de Région Chabrier, the Academy for Performing Arts in Hong Kong and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. Tung began his study of piano in his native St. Louis, Missouri, but pursued interests in the natural and social sciences at Yale, earning his degree in sociology. His professional commitment to music was a result of intense study under pianist and scholar John Kirkpatrick. Graduate piano studies followed under Barry Snyder at the Eastman School of Music and with Brooks Smith and John Perry at the University of Southern California. Tung is Professor Emeritus of Music at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, where he taught a wide range of topics, including a course in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His five-octave fortepiano was completed in 1983 by Janine and Paul Poletti, and is based on a circa 1795 instrument by Munich builder Johan Lodewijk Dulcken, which is currently in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.