Yunchan Lim @ Cliburn Concerts
—Review by Wayne Lee Gay
The world of classical piano music has a new superstar, appearing twice this week under the Cliburn Concerts banner at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum.
In June, 18-year-old Korean Yunchan Lim soared high, winning the gold medal at the prestigious quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth. Along the way, he demonstrated a rare combination of technique and intellect in a repertoire ranging from music of Mozart, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff to contemporary composer Stephen Hough.
Since then, a carefully planned internet presence by the Cliburn Foundation has produced a fan-base of millions for Lim, who continues, with the Foundation's guidance, to carefully test the waters of what will surely be a major career. Performances at major venues in recital and in concert with major orchestras in Europe and America are currently in the works, with heavy demand for appearances by Lim.
Lim's uniquely powerful artistic vision easily came to the forefront at the competition. In this week's return to Fort Worth, his genius stands out even more impressively in an all-romantic concert of works by Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Liszt.
Program selection per se almost doesn't matter in a performance by an artist of this stature, but Lim's repertoire for this concert is superbly constructed. Focused on three romantic-era composers, and made up entirely of works composed within the 22-year span between 1841 and 1863, the evening's agenda nonetheless includes a remarkable range of emotion and style. A theme of narrative and representational music—telling a story or painting a picture—underpins all.
Brahms' Four Ballades, Opus 10, presents the relatively young composer drawing inspiration from medieval Scottish folk poetry (in particular, the grim "Edward” ballad). Lim belies his own youth by capturing the mature, almost spiritual quality in this music, ranging from a hypnotic pianissimo to appropriately thunderous episodes. Virtuosity is not the main point here, but Lim gives audience members plenty of opportunity to appreciate and marvel at his easy control of the work's demands.
Brahms leads the listener from dark, evocative D minor to a gently reflective B major in the Four Ballades; Mendelssohn's Fantasy in F-sharp minor immediately casts a different aura. Nicknamed the "Scotch Sonata" (and composed during a period of visits by Mendelssohn to Scotland, contemporaneous with the "Scotch Symphony" and the Hebrides Overture), this compact work again shows off Lim's brilliant passage-work within an aura of elegance.
Lim's almost magical ability to convey and produce emotional effect, as well as his unfailing technical stamina, moves to an even higher level in works of Liszt in the second half. The composer paints two frankly descriptive pictures for a sort of aural cinema in his Deux légendes. In the first, "Saint Francis of Assisi Preaches to the Birds," Lim navigates Liszt's gauntlet of extended trills as the birds respond to the saint's serene pronouncements. In the second, "Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves," Lim equally succeeds in depicting the fluid rush of notes leading to the saint's triumph over the elements.
To close, Lim turns to one of Liszt's most challenging creations, Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata, a collection of technical trials evoking Dante's vision of Heaven and Hell in the epic La divina commedia. Once again, Lim amazes with his grasp of this daunting emotional task, paired with titanic muscle and faster-than-the-speed-of-light octaves.
Here is a young musician, largely unknown a few months ago, flying headlong into international fame and, hopefully, decades in the spotlight of the classical music world. Wednesday night, an uproarious ovation demanded encores. Cool and unruffled, Lim turned away from thunder and lightning to present, in a heavily romanticized but convincing rendition, the Largo from Bach's Keyboard Concerto No. 5. For his second encore he tricked the audience a little with a brief improvisational introduction leading to Chopin's famous Nocturne in E-flat, with the same command and insight that characterized the entire concert.
When: September 29
Where: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
Web: cliburn.org
