Last year, at the age of 18, the Korean Yunchan Lim became the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Since it was established in 1962, and named after the US pianist who had won the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow at the height of the cold war in 1958, the Van Cliburn has had a patchy record of rewarding pianists who have gone on to enjoy really significant international careers. But the word was that this time the winner was the real deal, and on Wednesday night the Wigmore Hall was packed to the rafters for Lim’s London debut.
In the competition it had been performances of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies and Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto that had made the deepest impression, but Lim’s programme for his Wigmore recital steered well clear of that high romantic repertoire,; Liszt only made an appearance for his second encore, the third of the Liebesträum.
