Vallejo Symphony Orchestra’s 2016-17 season continues on Jan. 29 with its second concert. The first performance of the season was titled “Morning,” so it is only fitting that the next show would be titled “Noon.” The show will feature performances of great works by Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich and Ludwig van Beethoven. For the second piece, VSO will be joined by guest cellist Zlatomir Fung.

Fung is 17 years old, but he has already accomplished a lot as a musician, having won the top prize at the International Brahms Competition in Austria in 2013, the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians in Switzerland in 2014 and the cello division of the George Enescu International Competition in Romania this past September.

Fung’s love of music, especially the cello, was instilled in him at a very early age when his parents decided he should take it up at the age of 3.

“My older sister had studied the violin a bit at the time, and they thought that I would have an aptitude for playing as well,” he said. “They thought that it would be nice to have different instruments.”

For the first year of playing, Fung never played a single note. Instead, he spent that time learning how to hold the instrument and bow. Once he got around to actually playing the instrument at the age of 5, he would practice for about half an hour every day. However, playing the cello felt like an obligation to Fung until he was in middle school and then he really fell in love with playing music.

“I went to these summer camps where I met a lot of really talented people, and I was amazed by the level they had achieved instrumentally and musically and the way that they thought about,” he said. “The depth in which they thought about music was very impressive.”

Fung loves playing music for himself but he also loves playing music for and with other people.

“Being a musician almost inevitably comes out of a love for other people who are musicians and what they do,” he said. “At a certain point, you just love it so much that you can’t help but pick it up yourself and want to do it yourself.”

“I love being able to play for my own personal enjoyment and fulfillment,” he added. “I also love being able to play music with other people because I think it’s a very deep and unique form of connection that I haven’t found an equivalent for anywhere else in the domains of my life. I also, of course, love performing for people and seeing their smiles afterwards.”

Fung currently resides in Westborough, Mass. but has played in venues all throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Aspen Music Festival. After winning first prize at the Irving Klein String Competition in San Francisco in 2014, he was able to get several other gigs afterwards, including the upcoming performance with Vallejo Symphony Orchestra. He will be performing Shostakovich’s “Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major,” which he describes as “one of the core works of the modern cello repertoire.”

The piece has four movements, and Fung describes the outer movements as rhythmically propulsive with aggressive articulations indicated for the soloist.

“(It has) a backdrop of orchestral motifs that repeat in a kind of biblical way and are almost haunting,” he said.

The inner movements, he says, are very dark and brooding but with soaring melodic lines and bitter countermelodies. It all builds up into a dramatic finale.

“I like to think of it as a piece that has two different lives,” Fung said.

The Shostakovich composition will be performed in between two other pieces of the evening, Haydn’s “Noon” symphony and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 3.” Fung hopes that all three pieces will take audiences on a musical journey.

“The works in this program have a totality that’s very consuming, and as far as my own Shostakovich performance will go, I hope the audience will feel the impact of this piece is self-contained and otherworldly in scope,” he said

The concert will be performed at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 29 at the Hogan Middle School Auditorium, located at 850 Rosewood Ave. in Vallejo. Tickets are $15 for students ages 13 and up, $30 for seniors ages 60 and up and $40 for adults. They can be purchased at BrownPaperTickets.com. For more information, visit http://www.vallejosymphony.org/season.html.