When South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim became, at 18, the youngest-ever victor at the Van CliburnPiano Competition in 2022, the reaction was rapturous. The YouTube video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s fiendishly difficult Third Piano Concerto garnered more than 13 million views in a span of eight months.
When he made his New York Philharmonic debut in May 2023, he was therefore a celebrity, but, as the Orchestra’s Associate Principal Second Violin, Lisa Eunsoo Kim, recalls: “He seemed very shy, very quiet, in his own world and very focused. It wasn’t that he was shutting himself off from us — there wasn’t any ‘attitude.’ He gave off a sense of just wanting to come and play beautiful music with us.” Of the performance, The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe enthused: “He plays like a dream… . [There was] the juxtaposition of precise clarity and expansive reverie; the vivid scenes and bursts of wit; the sense of contrasting yet organically developing moods; the endless and persuasive bendings of time."
The same could be said of Lim’s graceful interpretation of Chopin’s F-minor Piano Concerto (known as No. 2, though it was actually written before the composer’s E-minor), which he plays in his return to the NY Phil this month (November 27 to December 1). A taste of his interpretation is also available on YouTube, as he performed it at the 2018 Cleveland International Piano Competition, where he won both Second Place and the Chopin Special Award. He was just 14 at the time.
Yunchan Lim is perfectly suited to this repertoire. Composer Robert Schumann described Chopin’s music as “cannons buried in flowers” — a sonic garden imbued with a mysterious potency, and permeated with paradox: classically proportioned yet lushly romantic; buoyant but, as his friend and rival Franz Liszt noted, filled with a deep melancholy. Growing from the soil of his native Poland and inflected with its dance rhythms, Chopin’s concertos demand a sensitive and measured interpreter.
The composer himself was no blazing virtuoso. Of Chopin’s tone Berlioz found that “one is tempted to go close to the instrument and put one’s ear to it as if at a concert of sylphs or elves.” Nevertheless, Liszt found Chopin’s sound to be “perfect in the extreme.” To produce that “perfection” Chopin developed an entirely new technique of flexibility at the keyboard, in which, as composer Stephen Heller noted, Chopin’s slim hands would “suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard like a serpent opening its mouth to swallow a rabbit whole."
The shy Lim honed his astonishing musical and technical prowess under the supervision of his teacher, Minsoo Sohn. In Lim’s hands the music is always cleanly executed, the composer’s intricate filigree well-shaped; the pianist maintains a clear sense of architecture as the music surges and ebbs, by turns tender, introspective, vigorous, and passionate. He captures the sweeping lyricism of Chopin’s voice, its cries and whispers, without ever resorting to emotional exaggeration.
These qualities were evident in his New York Philharmonic debut, when he performed the Rachmaninoff concerto with which he won the Cliburn. Lisa Eunsoo Kim reflects: “I’ve played the Rachmaninoff here with world-famous soloists for almost 30 years, but he just blew my mind. Despite his youth it felt like you were hearing someone who has lived a long life, the way he evoked all the different emotions we experience. He has all the technique in the world, and he uses that technique to express what Rachmaninoff tried to express on paper. It was mind-blowing to hear it live.”
