Two Young Pianists Test Their Limits

When, past month, the preposterously talented twenty-year-old pianist Yunchan Lim played Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto astatine the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, successful Costa Mesa, California, the assemblage responded with 1 of the loudest noises I’ve lately heard successful a classical venue. The erstwhile week, Lim’s thirty-year-old workfellow Seong-Jin Cho gave an all-Ravel recital astatine Disney Hall, and concertgoers emitted a likewise full-throated roar. In some cases, the mean property of the assemblage was markedly little than the concert-hall norm. The 2 events gave maine a tremor of anticipation astir classical music’s eternally precarious future.

Lim and Cho some travel from South Korea, and radical of Korean practice marque up a bully portion of their sizeable instrumentality base. Both grew up successful nonmusical families and became spontaneously obsessed with the piano. Neither gravitates toward the flashier aspects of the virtuoso beingness style. Beyond that, their personalities diverge. Cho is an elegant performer who produces a preternaturally beauteous sound, though helium sometimes goes against benignant by staging unexpected expressive interventions. Lim is simply a volcanic endowment who renders scores by Liszt and Rachmaninoff arsenic though helium had composed them himself. He, too, resists being pigeonholed: his large offering this play is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the antipode of Romanticism. I saw him play the enactment astatine the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, successful La Jolla; successful April, helium volition bring it to Carnegie Hall. Truth beryllium told, neither Cho’s Ravel nor Lim’s Bach proved wholly persuasive. It’s healthy, however, for younger artists to trial their limits.

Cho attracted planetary announcement erstwhile helium won the Chopin Piano Competition successful 2015. Three years later, helium presented an fundamentally flawless programme of Chopin and Debussy astatine Disney, exhibiting pianissimo chords similar emeralds connected velvet. When helium returned successful 2023, helium came crossed arsenic a spikier, much unpredictable artist. Handel’s Suite No. 5 unfurled with bewitching grace and suppleness, but Brahms’s Handel Variations suffered from abrupt accents and overstudied phrasing. Schumann’s “Symphonic Études” were a feast of sumptuous sonority, yet cohesion was lacking. Cho seemed truthful enamored of each infinitesimal that helium periodically fto spell of the guiding thread. Still, his tone of hazard resulted successful 1 of the year’s much memorable recitals.

With his crystalline touch, Cho is simply a earthy acceptable for Ravel, whose hundred-and-fiftieth day arrives this year. The pianist has been touring with a programme of Ravel’s implicit solo keyboard works; helium has besides recorded them for Deutsche Grammophon. I don’t deliberation that the medium volition displace classical Ravel surveys by Samson François, Abbey Simon, and Steven Osborne—Cho’s versions are polished and controlled to a fault. At Disney, though, things heated up. The weightless opening of “Ondine,” the archetypal question of “Gaspard de la Nuit,” which sounds somewhat objective connected the recording, glowed and glimmered. “Le Gibet” and “Scarbo,” the 2nd and 3rd movements, exuded menace and power. In “Miroirs,” the birds of “Oiseaux Tristes” sang anxiously amid ominous silence, portion “Une Barque sur l’Océan” gave the heady feeling of being heaved implicit the crest of a wave.

Cho made a weaker content successful the smaller genre studies that capable retired Ravel’s soft output. The mercurial variations connected waltz bushed successful “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” needed much ironic fin-de-siècle charm than Cho supplied. By the clip helium reached the last work, “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” his attraction had dipped, and Ravel’s neo-Baroque rhythms were abbreviated connected drawback and lilt. Cho has noted his admiration for the large early-twentieth-century French pianist Marcelle Meyer, whose Ravel recordings are unsurpassed. He could inactive larn from Meyer’s mode of handling each operation arsenic if it were a measurement successful an invisible dance.

After his solo marathon, Cho joined Paavo Järvi and the L.A. Philharmonic to execute Ravel’s Concerto successful G. This heralded a companion D.G. recording, of Ravel’s 2 soft concertos, with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. Again, the unrecorded mentation bested the workplace one. On disk, the Bostonians play with maximum effervescence, but successful the Adagio of the Concerto successful G Cho’s effort astatine otherworldly lyricism turns listless. In L.A., Järvi discouraged specified longueurs by nudging tempos along, and the Satie-like main taxable of the Adagio became a mildly swaying trance. As an encore, Cho whipped up a vibrant relationship of the Rigaudon from “Tombeau”—more characterful than the 1 astatine the recital. What amounted to a weeklong Ravel residency ended with a stylish bang.

Lim changeable to fame erstwhile helium won the Van Cliburn Competition successful 2022. Stephen Hough, a subordinate of the Cliburn jury, said of Lim’s rendition of Liszt’s Transcendental Études, “He understood the rhetoric, the scope, the property of Liszt. It isn’t velocity but a benignant of interior charisma.” How this shy, shaggy-haired younker acquired specified extent of knowing isn’t instantly clear. He seems to person burrowed wrong the euphony from an aboriginal property and simply knows however it should go.

The celebrated opening of the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto—an expanding-and-contracting series of minatory F-minor-ish chords, with F’s tolling heavy below—established Lim’s sorcery astatine once. The composer asks for a gradual crescendo, which astir pianists construe arsenic a stepwise intensification of the large chords, with the debased notes pursuing suit. Lim, whose near manus is simply a unit of nature, applied ever-increasing unit to those F’s, truthful that they pulled america down into the Romantic abyss. Although Lim had impassioned accompaniment from Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony, helium was successful bid from the start. Which is not to accidental that helium made a spectacle of his virtuosity; the portion was arsenic symphonically integrated arsenic I’ve ever heard it. The assemblage detonation astatine the extremity was richly earned.

To leap from Rachmaninoff to Bach requires an adjustment. The Conrad, arsenic the La Jolla venue is known, possesses an exceptionally delicate acoustic, and astatine times Lim’s booming code swamped Bach’s geometric designs—like a Wagnerian soprano singing Gregorian chant. Certainly, this was not a show for purists. Lim followed András Schiff successful transposing the repetition sections of respective variations (Nos. 7 and 19 up an octave, No. 18 down). Here and there, helium added octaves successful the near hand. But thing helium did lacked taste. In immoderate case, playing Bach connected a performance expansive is an inherently impure act; Bach knew of nary specified instrument.

Lim has evidently pondered this cosmic euphony astatine length. Idiomatic ornaments enlivened the repetition sections; these had a peculiarly exhilarating interaction successful Variation 5, amid sixteenth notes of already breathtaking effortlessness. In the minor-key variations, Lim devised immoderate striking effects. In Variation 15, helium brought retired a tortured, astir modernistic ambiance by stressing dissonant notes and lamenting lines; successful the monumentally melancholy Variation 25, helium gave wrenching accent to a enactment descending from precocious D and past made the aforesaid transition affectingly subdued connected the repeat. Yet these movements were not drawn retired to the constituent of stasis, arsenic successful mannered caller performances by Vikingur Ólafsson.

Inevitably, Lim’s Goldbergs are a enactment successful progress. In La Jolla, they amounted to a collage of riveting episodes, alternatively than the benignant of afloat articulated communicative fashioned by specified experienced exponents arsenic Schiff, Murray Perahia, and Igor Levit. All the same, it was thrilling to ticker Lim navigate the Bachian labyrinth, which yields each its secrets to nary one.

Before launching into the Goldbergs, Lim offered a abbreviated portion by Hanurij Lee, titled “. . . circular and velvety-smooth blend . . .” Lee is simply a nineteen-year-old Korean composing prodigy who writes scores with titles similar “Supermarktmusik” and “Wrong Tempered Clavier” and seems drawn to Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Stockhausen. Lim’s expert, sympathetic show made 1 ideate immense caller swaths of repertory for him to explore. The encore was Liszt’s “Petrarch Sonnet No. 104,” which crashed against the ears similar the Pacific surf. ♦