Superlatives cluster around Yunchan Lim. At 18, he was the youngest pianist ever to win the prestigious Van Cliburn International piano competition in Texas. The webcast of his performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto went viral as “the pianist whose playing was so beautiful it reduced a conductor to tears”. Watch the Korean musician’s gold medal-winning performance, which now has amassed 15m views on YouTube (and is the platform’s most watched version of this much-loved romantic piano concerto), and you can indeed see Marin Alsop wipe her eyes at the end.
British pianist Stephen Hough, who was on the jury with Alsop, says: “People complain about piano competition winners all sounding the same. This was spectacularly not true about Yunchan Lim. He caught in a remarkable way the many facets of this hugely challenging piece: the need for control but also to feel that things are on the edge; huge power yet lyrical tenderness too.”
“He is a prodigiously gifted artist,” wrote the Guardian’s Andrew Clements, reviewing Lim’s recording of Chopin’s Etudes released earlier this year. “His technique [is] dazzlingly immaculate and the musical impulses propelling it startlingly original.”
“The most exciting new classical artist on the planet,” says Decca Record’sco-president Tom Lewis, who triumphed in the worldwide scramble to sign this “once-in-a-generation” talent.
So, should you believe the hype? British audiences will soon be able to hear him for themselves: Lim comes to the Proms on 29 July to play Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the “Emperor”. The concert was among the first to sell out and he is the season’s fastest-selling debut artist. “He is an unbelievable talent,” says Proms director David Pickard. “Absolutely no doubt the kind of artist who in 50 years’ time people will say, ‘I remember his BBC Proms debut.’”
Lim is still only 20 and rarely does face-to-face interviews. But I meet him in Lucerne, Switzerland, after a performance of Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. His English is not fluent and he prefers to speak through a translator, which makes this elegant, black-clad young man an even more enigmatic presence. He rarely makes eye contact and, as we talk, rolls his sleeves up and then down, or he carefully folds a napkin on the table. Softly spoken and a gentle presence, his answers are thoughtful but rarely expansive. He prefers to let his music do the talking.
He has talked previously about how he felt dissatisfied with his Van Cliburn performance and hasn’t been able to watch more than the first few minutes of it. I ask him about last night’s concerto. “The conductor and orchestra were very fine but no, I didn’t think I performed well,” he says. Several standing ovations begged to differ, but Lim says that he doesn’t notice the audience. On stage he focuses only on the music, on communicating it “truthfully and fearlessly”.
Federico Benigni is part of his management team. “He’s like a monk in his single-minded devotion to music,” he says. It is an apt word: there is a lack of ego in Lim’s worship of and devotion to classical music. “A famous performer and an earnest performer – a true artist – are two different things,” he told one interviewer. Lim just wants to serve the music.
Look at the cover of his debut recording for Decca. The choice of image was his. Against a black background his face is almost completely obscured by shadow. The sombre feel extends to the lettering, while the eagle-eyed might spot that the Decca logo is not the label’s current branding; it’s one from 50 years ago, used at Lim’s request in homage to the many great pianists of the past century that recorded for the same label. His message is clear: it’s about the music and its legacy, not him.
He began piano lessons aged seven, drawn to the majesty of the instrument. None of his family are musicians, but his mother listened to recordings of Chopin and Liszt, while his father was “a great fan of Korean traditional music”, he tells me. “Well before I was seven I was surrounded by musical stimuli.” His talent was immediately apparent and aged 13, a student at the Korean National Institute for the Gifted in Arts, he met his teacher and mentor, Minsoo Sohn, with whom he still studies.
But growing up in an internet age when, online, everything is everywhere all at once, Lim was also able to learn from many of the great performers of the past century, and seek out weird, wonderful, forgotten and fabulous recordings. His playlist for Apple Music Classical, The Golden Age of Piano, is a fascinating glimpse into some of the musicians who inspire him, from Horowitz and Rachmaninov and Sofronitsky (his Instagram handle is “sofrolimsky” a tribute to the pianist who died in 1961 and barely performed outside his native Russia) to lesser-known names including Youri Egorov and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.
“Many, many pianists of the past and present have influenced me,” says Lim. “Arcadi Volodos, Mikhail Pletnev and Clara Haskil come first to mind, but there are too many to mention.” But there is one who is first among equals: “Rachmaninov. He is at the top of that list. I was nine when I first heard the recording of him playing Chopin’s Waltz. I was immediately struck by it. For me he is the greatest, the most consummate musician.”
He names also Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven as composers whose music he particularly loves; it’s Beethoven he’ll be playing at the Proms. What is his interpretation of his Fifth Piano Concerto? “I think in this piece, Beethoven describes a utopia where everyone is equal, where everyone has freedom and hope. I try to create that world,” he says.
He has known about the Proms for almost as long as he’s been playing the piano. “When I was nine I watched a video of Evgeny Kissin playing Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto there [in 2000]. It was just amazing. From that moment I dreamed of being part of the festival,” he says, giving me a rare smile, his eyes shining.
Beyond the piano, though, what does he like to do? Can he really have spent the entirety of the past 13 years practising, thinking about, listening to and exploring the piano? Pretty much. “I practise for six hours a day, but sometimes, ahead of a concert, more,” he says. In Texas for the fortnight of the competition it was as much as 20 hours a day, fuelled by English muffins at midnight. He loves pizza and lasagne too.
“He’s curious about everything, and that extends to new food,” laughs Benigni. “We were in Paris recently and I ordered snails. Yunchan asked to try them and declared them delicious with butter.”
He might not listen to the K-pop that is his country’s most famous musical export, but jazz is a passion. Again, though, he looks to past performers for inspiration – he admires particularly Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson. “I love to explore the way those two pianists played, their touch, their freedom of expression.”
To relax, he likes to hang out with friends, he says, and on his travels loves to visit museums. Playing in Poland was a particular highlight, “because I felt that I could feel Chopin’s soul there”. Visiting the Sistine Chapel was special because he felt able to understand more about Liszt, who when living in Rome had composed his organ piece Évocation à la Chapelle Sixtine. Lim can go unnoticed in many cities, but not his native Korea, where his level of fame is such that he generally has to have security. His face was printed on T-shirts following his Van Cliburn win, and today fans travel from all over the world to be at his concerts.
At Lucerne there are a handful of them at the stage door. Denys and Tengyan (both studying in Switzerland, originally from Ukraine and China respectively) found him through the viral Van Cliburn performance. “He has the power of bringing people light and hope through his music,” says Tengyan. Denys tells me he finds his dedication inspiring, and asks if I can deliver some silver foil-wrapped raspberry brownies that he has made for him.
The next morning I hand over the brownies to Benigni who smiles. “The fans are present everywhere he goes,” he says. “They are lovely and very loyal.” Sometimes it can be a little too much, he does admit – “in London after Yunchan’s Wigmore Hall concert, I had to act as a bodyguard and physically give him some space because people just wanted to touch him.”
And Lim? Does he find it intrusive? No, he says. He is so grateful for his fans, but really, he just concentrates on the piano. Certainly, unlike many musicians his social media presence is minimal and almost completely free of personal detail.
His home today is Boston, where his teacher is. His mother is there too, to look after him, and his management team are careful to limit his concerts to around 40 a year. “He needs time to study, to learn new repertoire and chill – he’s still a boy!” says Benigni.
So, with the world at his feet, what next? What guides his choice of repertoire? Most importantly, a piece has to completely fascinate him, he says. “I want to play challenging large-scale works, pieces that have great meaning in classical music history.” He’s currently working on Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto. But contemporary music will be part of his future plans, although he no longer composes himself – he hasn’t the time, he says with regret. “I want to be an artist who can play everything. I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities, just like the universe.”
• Yunchan Lim is at the Proms on 29 July. Promming tickets are available on the day, or listen live or on demand on Radio 3 or BBC Sounds. His recording of Chopin Études is out now on Decca or to stream.
