David Fung

BIOGRAPHY

Praised for his “ravishing and simply gorgeous” performances by The Washington Post, pianist David Fung brings an expansive imagination to the concerto and recital stage, combining a deep engagement with the core repertoire and a restless curiosity for music in all its forms. His artistic vision is rooted in the ancient Greek orchestra, the “place of dancing”—an idea of performance as an act of moving together. Across the concerto, chamber, and solo stages, Mr. Fung sees performance as an act of shared presence, animated by the interplay of listening, response, and expression among performers and audience alike.

With a repertoire spanning more than seventy concertos, Mr. Fung regularly appears with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including The Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, working with conductors such as Marin Alsop and Gustavo Dudamel. His affinity for Mozart and Bach has led to collaborations with the Baltimore, Israel, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Orpheus, and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, as well as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

The 2026–27 season reflects the breadth of Mr. Fung’s musical interests. He makes debuts with orchestras in Auburn, Fort Myers, Memphis, and Texarkana, and returns to the Orchestra of St. Luke’s for three Mozart concertos at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. His recital and chamber music engagements include appearances at the Chan Centre, Colburn Presents, Duke Presents, La Jolla Music Society, Stanford Live, and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Festival appearances take him to the Anchorage Chamber Music Festival, At the World’s Edge Music Festival in New Zealand, the Borromeo Music Festival in Switzerland, Orford Musique, and the Við Djúpið Music Festival in Iceland. He has also been named a 2027 Associate Artist of the Australia Ensemble.

Mr. Fung’s longstanding interest in expanding the musical conversation has been noted by The Washington Post, which singled out his “canny” programming. In 2025, he gave the first major U.S. performance of Grazyna Bacewicz’s Piano Concerto (1949) with the California Symphony and Donato Cabrera; in 2026, he premiered Patrick Carrabré’s Piano Concerto: A Guest on These Lands (2024). He previously gave the West Coast premiere of Chen Qigang’s Piano Concerto: Er Huang with the San Francisco Symphony.

Mr. Fung made his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in 2021, performing with Yuja Wang and Gustavo Dudamel, following his appearance with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in celebration of Orchestra Hall’s centennial. His highly acclaimed debut with The Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival was described by Cleveland Classical as “everything you could wish for,” while The Plain Dealer praised him as “an agile and alert interpreter of Mozart’s crystalline note-spinning.” The following week, he performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini at Beijing’s National Stadium as part of the Olympic Summer Festival.

His concerto engagements have included performances with the Albany, Arkansas, California, Charleston, Fort Wayne, Kitchener-Waterloo, Israel, Las Vegas, Marin, New Haven, Niagara, San Diego, Southwest Florida, Sun Valley, and Tucson Symphonies, as well as the National Orchestra of Belgium, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, Orchestra Wellington, Symphony Tacoma, Tampere Philharmonic, and Xiamen Philharmonic. He has also performed with Australia’s major orchestras, including the Melbourne, Queensland, and Sydney Symphony Orchestras.

As a recitalist and chamber musician, Mr. Fung has appeared at many of the world’s most distinguished festivals and venues, including Aspen, Blossom, Bridgehampton, Caramoor, Edinburgh, Hong Kong Arts, Ottawa, Ravinia, Savannah, and Tippet Rise. At his Edinburgh International Festival debut, the Edinburgh Guide described him as “impossibly virtuosic, prodigiously talented... and who probably does ten more impossible things daily before breakfast.” He has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Louvre, Gewandhaus, Palais des Beaux-Arts, and Zürich Tonhalle, as well as major halls throughout Asia, including Beijing Concert Hall, Guangzhou Opera House, Hong Kong Town Hall, Seoul Arts Center, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, Taiwan National Concert Hall, and Tianjin Grand Theater. His chamber music collaborators include the Brentano, Dover, Jupiter, and Verona Quartets.

Mr. Fung can be heard on more than a dozen acclaimed recordings released by ATMA, Genuin, Métier, Orchid, Pentatone, Naxos, and Yarlung. In August 2020, Steinway & Sons released Transcendent Beethoven, which was featured on Apple Music’s Best of Beethoven, a selection of outstanding releases marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The album followed the label’s acclaimed 2019 release of the first installment of Mr. Fung’s complete Mozart sonatas. His Mozart recording was described as “undeniably bold” by AllMusic Guide and praised by Boston’s WCRB as “heartbreaking,” with the station observing that “Fung relishes the art of exploring Mozart’s characters – giving them freedom to breathe, and casting them in darkness and light to help reveal their humanity.”

Mr. Fung rose to international prominence as a top prizewinner at the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels and the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Masters Competition in Tel Aviv, where he was also awarded the Chamber Music and Mozart Prizes. He was the first piano graduate of the prestigious Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he studied with John Perry, and subsequently worked with Peter Frankl and Claude Frank at Yale University and Arie Vardi at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. In 2002, he won the ABC Young Performer of the Year Award while studying with Margaret Hair in Sydney. He has also received artistic guidance from such piano luminaries as András Schiff, Alfred Brendel, and Leon Fleisher.

Making his home in Vancouver and New York City, Mr. Fung serves on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and the University of British Columbia and is a curator at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver. He is a Steinway Artist.

Mr. Fung is represented in Australia and New Zealand by Cinque Artist Management, and in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan by QLHW Management Ltd.

Updated April 2026. Please discard all previously dated materials.

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