When Bryan Cheng was a young child, he asked his parents if he could play a musical instrument.
After all, his elder sister, Silvie, had a grand piano to practise on in their Ottawa home and was performing well.
But when they suggested he, too, take up the keyboard, Bryan looked elsewhere. “I wanted something different, something of my own,” the 21-year-old professional musician remembered.
His folks led him to a Suzuki method school for group lessons. There, he audited a violin class but didn’t like the tone, he recalled, so the three-and-a-half-year-old boy opted instead for the bigger strings with the “deep and scary sound”: the cello.
Two years later, as Bryan’s teacher led classes in the family’s basement, the instructor often would hear Silvie playing the piano upstairs.
Soon, the brother and sister were performing together regularly. “It just came so naturally,” said Bryan, of their musical union. “We clicked and since then we’ve never stopped.”
Their first official concert as the Cheng² Duo (pronounced Cheng Squared Duo) was a lucky break — at least for them.
When the scheduled musician for a Carnegie Hall concert became injured, the Chengs filled in the slot at the prestigious New York City Weill Recital Hall.
Since then, the Cheng² Duo has toured around the world and recorded three albums, the most recent of which will be released this spring.
The double CD, titled Russian Legends, completes a trilogy for the siblings, with the first two albums focusing on French and Spanish music (Violoncelle francais 2016, and Violonchelo del fuego 2018).
Having a compilation dedicated to Russian composers — Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff, for example — is also a nod to Bryan’s Russian-Canadian teacher from Montreal, the late Yuli Turovsky, who guided him through his formative years. “We have felt very connected to Russian music all of our lives,” said Silvie, who calls New York home.
This and next month, the Chengs are on a B.C./Yukon tour to showcase their talent with two different programs.
And their run includes a stop at Coquitlam’s Evergreen Cultural Centre on Saturday, which the siblings say is suitable for music lovers of all ages.
“We’ve had quite a range in our audience on our tour so far, from 6 to 102,” Silvie, a New York resident, told The Tri-City News last Friday while travelling to Quadra Island with Bryan, who now calls Berlin home.
Meanwhile, for their shows, Bryan is playing a 1696 Bonjour Stradivarius cello with a 1830 Shaw Adam cello bow — on loan from the Canada Council for the Arts' Musical Instrument Bank, of whose 2018 competition he is the first laureate.
• Tickets to see the Cheng² Duo on Feb. 2 at the Evergreen Cultural Centre (1205 Pinetree Way) range from $15 to $29. Call 604-927-6555 or visit evergreenculturalcentre.ca.
