In June 2022, the eighteen-year-old Yunchan Lim became the youngest first-prize winner in the history of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. His semifinal performance of Liszt’s Transcendental Études and his final-round performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 3 were widely acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. The Rachmaninov, with nearly ten million views on YouTube, has been praised as evidence of the utmost technical proficiency and of a rare combination of honesty and humility with a calm confidence, all the rarer in a pianist as young as Lim, who has been hailed as a ‘young master’.
This concert at Wigmore Hall was Lim’s debut in the United Kingdom. His program, centered on the Renaissance, Baroque, and late Classical periods, contrasted sharply with the Liszt and Rachmaninov that launched his career. That is not to say it was a conservative choice. If anything, choosing for a debut a program whose most familiar and most recent piece was the Eroica Variations was further evidence of Lim’s unassuming self-assurance.
The program began with Dowland’s Pavana Lachrymae, written for lute and arranged here by William Byrd. The piece “mines a Hamlet-like vein of melancholy introspection”, as Richard Wigmore’s program note puts it, and Lim conveyed that melancholy with ease and polish. Dowland’s polyphonic lines overlapped but stayed clearly distinguishable, each in turn swelling into an outburst of sorrow and receding into a reserved calm. Lim’s generous pedal made the piano’s strings ring like a lute’s. Far from an understated beginning, the Dowland set the tone for the rest of the recital with its sensitivity and purity of sound.
Lim continued with Bach’s Sinfonias, also known as the Three-Part Inventions, which Bach wrote as exercises for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, then about nine. The first two measures of the first Sinfonia, in C major, were further evidence of Lim’s exquisite touch. There, a stepwise, scale-like theme enters in the highest voice and is echoed at once in the middle voice and again in the bass. Simple as the theme is, Lim gave its first entrance a brighter tone and its second entrance, a fifth lower, an inquisitive, quietly playful one. The command of polyphony he showed in the Dowland was on fuller display in many of the Sinfonias, where each of the three voices had its own character, and together they formed a complex braid of charming interplay.
After the second Sinfonia, in C minor, Lim played the rest in an order of his own, alternating between the more virtuosic and the more placid. In the virtuosic ones, Bach’s music sparkled under his fingers. In the placid ones, however, Lim’s pedaling, as generous as in the Dowland, often blurred the differences in character he was trying to draw. His liberties with tempo, too, gave the faster Sinfonias a delightful charm but made the slower ones languid. Some of Bach’s slower keyboard works suit the lugubrious tone of the Pavana Lachrymae (Variation 25 of the Goldberg Variations comes to mind), but many others need a floating, lilting rhythm to avoid sentimentality. So Sinfonias such as no. 15 in B minor, with its brilliant arpeggios, were highlights, while solemn ones such as no. 4 in D minor occasionally lost their sense of direction.
After the interval, Lim turned to another set of short pieces: Beethoven’s Seven Bagatelles, op. 33, written around the same time as the Eroica Symphony and the Eroica Variations. The charm Lim brought to some of the Sinfonias returned in the Bagatelles, where Beethoven’s jovial, often sarcastic writing asks for it outright. So it was in the E-flat major and the first C major Bagatelles, but less so in the F major, which was afflicted by a glut of pedal. In the A major and D major Bagatelles, rhythmic liberties made the Andante and the Allegretto quasi Andante stumble rather than amble. Fortunately, the set ended with the A-flat major Bagatelle, marked Presto and played with panache.
With hardly a pause, Lim went on to the Eroica Variations. Like the Sinfonias and the Bagatelles, the Variations range widely in tone, from boisterous virtuosity to grandeur to delicate intimacy. Unlike those sets, they also demand that the performer hold the whole work together. Given how sentimental and overpedaled some of Lim’s slower pieces had been earlier in the program, one could reasonably have worried that this demand would go unmet.
Any such concerns were immediately put to rest. Lim’s impressive control of the instrument was on its clearest display yet in the Eroica Variations. Beethoven wrote them to show off his own virtuosity, and Lim played even the most finger-twisting passages with pearl-like clarity and lightness. The more expressive variations had a tasteful sensitivity much closer to his Dowland than to his Bach. Lim deftly interwove every texture and mood Beethoven calls for, Beethoven’s humor landed as a well-placed joke instead of an overcorrection from melancholy, and the structure of the whole held. By the end of the Variations, Lim had successfully reconjured the image of the deeply sensitive ‘young master’ that first emerged at the Cliburn and again at the start of the evening.
After three rounds of raucous applause, Lim returned for Myra Hess’s arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, where the devotional approach he took in the slower Sinfonias was much more at home. He followed his compelling Bach/Hess with another popular encore, Liszt’s Liebestraum no. 3, the only Romantic work of the evening and a chance to show the exquisite taste for rubato he showed in the Rachmaninov at the Cliburn. Where many performances of the Liebestraum sound like half-hearted daydreams, Lim’s moved through passionate outbursts, forlorn sighs, and glowing smiles. On paper, the encores might look overplayed; in the hall, their sincerity and range made them utterly convincing.
While not consistently perfect, Lim’s UK debut was further proof that he is, simply put, a massive talent—a young master at eighteen—with room yet to grow as an artist.