The 18-year-old South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim last year became the youngest person ever to win the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. His performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto caused a sensation, and has been watched over 9 million times on YouTube in just three months.
His Wigmore Hall solo recital last night was keenly awaited. Would it prove just another high-octane pyrotechnical display, short on genuine musicianship, or would it be the real deal? Well before the end of the evening there was little doubt that it was the latter.
Before playing a note, Lim demonstrated a streak of originality with his choice of programme. Nothing in the first half was actually written for the piano. The opening item was an arrangement by William Byrd (intended for the virginals) of John Dowland‘s celebrated song Flow my Teares, which began life anyway as a lute solo. The rest of the half was taken up with Bach’s set of three-part Sinfonias or Inventions, which would originally have been played on a harpsichord or clavichord.
Lim nevertheless claimed these pieces for his instrument, delivering them with a good deal of interpretative freedom but always within an appropriate and mature sense of style. The sighing phrases of the Dowland were transmuted into subtly coloured, immaculately voiced arcs, while the Bach miniatures were imaginatively dispatched with a different mood or temperament for each – jaunty, good-humoured, pensive and so forth – ending with a poignant reading of the F minor, with its anguished chromaticisms.
What followed after the interval was far from conventional too. The earliest of Beethoven’s op. 33 set of Bagatelles (or “trifles” as he called them) were written by the composer when he was not much older than Lim. Their anarchic offbeat accents, capricious pauses and the smile-inducing unpredictability of it all were relished by the player. So too was the range of moods explored in Beethoven’s Eroica Variations, where Lim’s virtuosity was at its most dazzling, yet as always deployed so as to highlight the idiosyncratic exuberance of the music.
The two encores, Myra Hess’s famous arrangement of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Liszt’s equally popular Liebestraum No. 3, may have been unashamed crowd-pleasers, but who could complain when they were played with such flawless control and evident affection?
It’s a pleasure to report that not only was the hall full, but a good number of the audience were evidently young compatriots of Lim’s who, clearly mesmerised by his playing, sat throughout in appreciative silence. At the close of the recital proper, however, virtually the entire audience rose excitedly to its feet, mobiles held aloft to capture the young star’s image. Lim could well prove to be the Lang Lang of his generation.
