South Korean keyboard phenom Yunchan Lim clearly has the scintillating virtuosity of Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin at his fingertips.
But Lim — after rocketing to worldwide stardom in 2022 at age 18 as the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition — now seems to be looking beyond the 19th-century warhorses of the piano repertoire that fueled his initial success.
For his local debut at Herbst Theatre on Tuesday, Feb. 25, he gave the audience a taste of something different: an original and often unpredictable account of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The single, sold-out concert, presented by Chamber Music San Francisco, was the latest stop on the pianist’s international tour.
Although the Goldbergs are a pop culture favorite (Hannibal Lecter was famously a fan in The Silence of the Lambs), the Baroque keyboard work is surprisingly difficult, both for performers and listeners. Bach’s composition is structured as a series of 30 variations on the same chord progression, first spelled out in the opening Aria. Without a compelling performance to pull it all together, the piece risks becoming monotonous or simply confusing in its dizzying array of contrapuntal techniques and keyboard gymnastics packed into movement after movement.
Lim is the latest in a line of great keyboardists to face these challenges and put his personal stamp on the Goldbergs. Tuesday evening’s concert was a fearless, uncompromising display of the pianist’s breathtaking musicianship. Still only 20, he has already earned the universal admiration of the international piano community for his uncanny combination of astounding technical facility and supple, almost instinctual interpretations.
Lim doesn’t stand on ceremony. Conventional wisdom would decry placing additional works — and certainly encores — around the Goldbergs, but the pianist furnished both. He opened the concert with a short contemporary work, …round and velvety-smooth blend… by Hanurij Lee, which proceeded directly into the Bach without pause. In Lim’s thoughtful and deft rendition, Lee’s piece was languidly inviting, if insubstantial compared to the behemoth that was to follow.
Although his demeanor is always reserved, Lim delivered the Goldbergs in a way that confirmed how, on a musical level, he is unwilling to let convention or formula constrain him. As he plunged through the first few variations, his uncompromisingly ambitious sensibilities were immediately apparent. In the notoriously treacherous Variation 5, where the two hands are forced to pass over each other while unfurling propulsive scales, he somehow glided along with sparkling serenity at breakneck speed — a nearly impossible feat with a superb payoff.
From the outset, Lim’s playing exuded a warm, good-natured expressivity. While there are a few brooding variations, most of the numbers are glittering and exuberant. His playing radiated joy and spontaneity here, totally unencumbered by the rocky difficulties of the passagework.
While it is common performance practice to ornament the repeat of each section, Lim did so with particular relish, marshaling his digital dexterity to decorate the notes with delightful twists, turns, and loop-de-loops. With a sense of infinite curiosity, he played the piece like a breathless game. Cheeky phrases darted back and forth, accents peeked out from behind walls of arpeggios, sequences tirelessly tumbled uphill and back down again.
When the novelty of this approach wore off, however, the sheer energy and variety of Lim’s interpretation became disorienting and, at times, tiresome. One of Lim’s most impressive skills is his dynamic control: He can yank a phrase from thunderously loud to ethereally delicate with ease. This effect was deployed liberally, often with an abrupt fluctuation in tempo, to wring emotional intensity out of long, legato lines — the undulating melodies in the Aria, for example, or the chromatic shrieks of the melancholy Variation 25.
But Lim’s interpretive interventions also had a capricious quality, appearing abruptly and seeming to interrupt the piece’s momentum, development, and sense of continuity. If at first these playful experiments revealed unexpected and refreshing layers to Bach’s familiar composition, the final result was a feeling of never-ending whiplash.
Any misfires, clearly the products of an adventurous musical personality, do nothing to diminish Lim’s stature as a generational talent. His approach to the piano has already reaped magical results, especially in the music of Liszt. On this program, Lim rendered a delectable account of the Hungarian composer’s Sonetto 104 del Petrarca as an encore.
Having achieved a rare level of success so early in his career, Lim is now just beginning to chart his own course.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
