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.”
