When, remaining month, the preposterously proficient twenty-year-old pianist Yunchan Lim performed Rachmaninoff’s 2d Piano Concerto on the Segerstrom Heart for the Arts, in Costa Mesa, California, the gang spoke back with one of the most loudest noises I’ve in recent years heard in a classical venue. The former week, Lim’s thirty-year-old colleague Seong-Jin Cho gave an all-Ravel recital at Disney Corridor, and concertgoers emitted a in a similar fashion full-throated roar. In each instances, the common age of the target audience was once markedly not up to the concert-hall norm. The 2 occasions gave me a tremor of hope about classical track’s without end precarious long term.
Lim and Cho each come from South Korea, and other folks of Korean heritage make up a excellent a part of their really extensive fan base. Each grew up in nonmusical households and was spontaneously obsessive about the piano. Neither gravitates towards the flashier facets of the virtuoso lifestyles taste. Past that, their personalities diverge. Cho is a chic performer who produces a preternaturally stunning sound, even though he once in a while is going towards sort through staging surprising expressive interventions. Lim is a volcanic skill who renders rankings through Liszt and Rachmaninoff as regardless that he had composed them himself. He, too, resists being pigeonholed: his main providing this season is Bach’s Goldberg Permutations, the antipode of Romanticism. I noticed him play the paintings on the Conrad Prebys Appearing Arts Heart, in Los angeles Jolla; in April, he’s going to convey it to Carnegie Corridor. Fact be informed, neither Cho’s Ravel nor Lim’s Bach proved solely persuasive. It’s wholesome, then again, for more youthful artists to check their limits.
Cho attracted global realize when he received the Chopin Piano Festival in 2015. 3 years later, he introduced an necessarily flawless program of Chopin and Debussy at Disney, showing pianissimo chords like emeralds on velvet. When he returned in 2023, he got here throughout as a spikier, extra unpredictable artist. Handel’s Suite No. 5 unfurled with bewitching grace and adaptability, however Brahms’s Handel Permutations suffered from abrupt accents and overstudied phraseology. Schumann’s “Symphonic Études” had been a dinner party of luxurious sonority, but brotherly love was once missing. Cho appeared so enamored of every second that he periodically let move of the guiding thread. Nonetheless, his spirit of chance ended in one of the most yr’s extra memorable recitals.
Along with his crystalline contact, Cho is a herbal are compatible for Ravel, whose hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary arrives this yr. The pianist has been traveling with a program of Ravel’s whole solo keyboard works; he has additionally recorded them for Deutsche Grammophon. I don’t assume that the album will displace vintage Ravel surveys through Samson François, Abbey Simon, and Steven Osborne—Cho’s variations are polished and regulated to a fault. At Disney, regardless that, issues heated up. The weightless opening of “Ondine,” the primary motion of “Gaspard de l. a. Nuit,” which sounds rather medical at the recording, glowed and glimmered. “Le Gibet” and “Scarbo,” the second one and 3rd actions, exuded risk and tool. In “Miroirs,” the birds of “Oiseaux Tristes” sang anxiously amid ominous silence, whilst “Une Barque sur l’Océan” gave the heady feeling of being heaved over the crest of a wave.
Cho made a weaker influence within the smaller style research that fill out Ravel’s piano output. The mercurial diversifications on waltz rhythm in “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” wanted extra ironic fin-de-siècle appeal than Cho equipped. By the point he reached the general paintings, “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” his focus had dipped, and Ravel’s neo-Baroque rhythms had been quick on snap and lilt. Cho has famous his admiration for the nice early-twentieth-century French pianist Marcelle Meyer, whose Ravel recordings are unsurpassed. He may just nonetheless be told from Meyer’s approach of dealing with every word as though it had been a step in an invisible dance.
After his solo marathon, Cho joined Paavo Järvi and the L.A. Philharmonic to accomplish Ravel’s Concerto in G. This heralded a better half D.G. recording, of Ravel’s two piano concertos, with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. Once more, the reside model bested the studio one. On disk, the Bostonians play with most effervescence, however within the Adagio of the Concerto in G Cho’s try at otherworldly lyricism turns listless. In L.A., Järvi discouraged such longueurs through nudging tempos alongside, and the Satie-like major theme of the Adagio was a delicately swaying trance. As an encore, Cho whipped up a colourful account of the Rigaudon from “Tombeau”—extra characterful than the only on the recital. What amounted to a weeklong Ravel residency ended with a trendy bang.
Lim shot to reputation when he received the Van Cliburn Festival in 2022. Stephen Hough, a member of the Cliburn jury, mentioned of Lim’s rendition of Liszt’s Transcendental Études, “He understood the rhetoric, the scope, the character of Liszt. It isn’t velocity however a type of internal air of secrecy.” How this shy, shaggy-haired adolescence obtained such intensity of working out isn’t in an instant transparent. He turns out to have burrowed throughout the track from an early age and easily is aware of the way it will have to move.
The well-known opening of the Rachmaninoff 2d Concerto—an expanding-and-contracting collection of minatory F-minor-ish chords, with F’s tolling deep beneath—established Lim’s sorcery immediately. The composer asks for a gentle crescendo, which maximum pianists interpret as a stepwise intensification of the massive chords, with the low notes following swimsuit. Lim, whose left hand is a drive of nature, implemented ever-increasing power to these F’s, in order that they pulled us down into the Romantic abyss. Even if Lim had impassioned accompaniment from Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony, he was once in command from the beginning. Which isn’t to mention that he made a spectacle of his virtuosity; the piece was once as symphonically built-in as I’ve ever heard it. The target audience explosion on the finish was once richly earned.
To leap from Rachmaninoff to Bach calls for an adjustment. The Conrad, because the Los angeles Jolla venue is understood, possesses an exceptionally delicate acoustic, and from time to time Lim’s booming tone swamped Bach’s geometric designs—like a Wagnerian soprano making a song Gregorian chant. Unquestionably, this was once no longer a efficiency for purists. Lim adopted András Schiff in transposing the repeat sections of a number of diversifications (Nos. 7 and 19 up an octave, No. 18 down). Right here and there, he added octaves within the left hand. However not anything he did lacked style. After all, enjoying Bach on a live performance grand is an inherently impure act; Bach knew of no such device.
Lim has clearly contemplated this cosmic track at period. Idiomatic adorns enlivened the repeat sections; those had a specifically exhilarating affect in Variation 5, amid 16th notes of already breathtaking effortlessness. Within the minor-key diversifications, Lim devised some placing results. In Variation 15, he introduced out a tortured, nearly modernistic environment through stressing dissonant notes and lamenting strains; within the monumentally despair Variation 25, he gave wrenching emphasis to a line descending from top D after which made the similar passage affectingly subdued at the repeat. But those actions weren’t drawn out to the purpose of stasis, as in mannered contemporary performances through Vikingur Ólafsson.
Inevitably, Lim’s Goldbergs are a piece in growth. In Los angeles Jolla, they amounted to a collage of riveting episodes, quite than the type of totally articulated narrative formed through such skilled exponents as Schiff, Murray Perahia, and Igor Levit. All of the similar, it was once exciting to look at Lim navigate the Bachian labyrinth, which yields all its secrets and techniques to nobody.
Prior to launching into the Goldbergs, Lim introduced a brief piece through Hanurij Lee, titled “. . . spherical and velvety-smooth mix . . .” Lee is a nineteen-year-old Korean composing prodigy who writes rankings with titles like “Supermarktmusik” and “Incorrect Tempered Clavier” and turns out attracted to Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Stockhausen. Lim’s knowledgeable, sympathetic efficiency made one believe huge new swaths of repertory for him to discover. The encore was once Liszt’s “Petrarch Sonnet No. 104,” which crashed towards the ears just like the Pacific surf.
