United States JS Bach, Goldberg Variations, BWV988: Yunchan Lim (piano). Carnegie Hall, New York, 25.4.2025. (ES-S)
Following his recent triumph at the twentieth annual BBC Music Magazine Awards – where he became the first artist to win three prizes for a single album, including Recording of the Year – Yunchan Lim reflected with characteristic humility: ‘I strive always to harmonize what my heart tells me with what my mind dictates’. It is a sentiment that could well have served as a motto for his Carnegie Hall recital, where intellect and emotion were woven into a tapestry of sound at once luminous, searching and profoundly human.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations has long been a rite of passage for keyboard players, demanding not only technical brilliance but profound structural and emotional understanding. Unlike other monuments of the repertoire, the work offers no definitive roadmap. Composed for a two-manual harpsichord but inviting endless exploration on the modern piano, it leaves questions of dynamics, tempo, articulation, pedaling and ornamentation almost entirely to the performer’s discretion. It is precisely this openness – this freedom to reshape the music within one’s own expressive language – that has made the Goldberg Variations a living canvas for generations of interpreters. Many musicians wait decades before confronting its challenges in public. Lim, still only 21, approached this monumental work with a striking combination of daring and reverence, offering a reading that felt vividly modern yet deeply attuned to Bach’s spirit of invention.
Lim revealed little outward emotion, but there was nothing mechanical or pre-programmed in his playing. Even in his calm, almost impassive physical demeanor, the focus remained inward, the expressiveness unfolding entirely through sound. From the opening Aria, he revealed the contours of his musical sensibility: a singing, humanized line shaped by delicate phrasing and a subtle melancholy. Rather than imposing a rigid formalism, he allowed the music to breathe, inflecting the melody with an understated inwardness, setting the tone for a journey defined by sensitivity and imagination.
From the outset, it became clear that Lim’s reading was not primarily concerned with showcasing the Goldberg Variations as a supreme example of Bach’s gift for the ‘art of counterpoint’. Rather than treating the work as a formal display of imitative techniques – most prominently, but not exclusively, concentrated in every third variation, from No.3 (‘Canone all’unisuono’) to No.27 (‘Canone alla none’) – he focused on its possibilities for color, rhythm and texture. In the process, Lim’s interpretative priorities occasionally made some of the inner melodic arcs feel incomplete, their natural resolutions elided in favor of broader gestural flow.
The emphasis on rhythmic vitality and coloristic shading shaped Lim’s approach to the score from the very early variations. No.1 unfolded less as a carefully layered conversation among voices than as a flowing interplay of shapes and timbres. In faster movements – notably Variation 5 and again in the cascading figurations of Variation 14 – he occasionally pressed the tempo to the edge of breathlessness. Despite the high velocity, clarity never faltered: even at these daring speeds, the main contrapuntal strands remained articulate, and the textural transparency he maintained prevented any descent into mere brilliance.
Lim’s pursuit of variety took multiple forms throughout the performance. The glittering eruption of Variation 14 emerged in Lim’s hands as a dazzling release after the deeply introspective poise he had cultivated in Variation 13, highlighting the emotional and expressive range he brought to the set. His approach to the repeated sections was equally imaginative and restrained. Rather than inserting excessive embellishments, he often altered dynamics, touch or register to create subtle shifts in character. In several variations – notably No.7 and No.19 – he transposed the repeated material by an octave, lending fresh color and character to the reprises. Far from feeling mannered, these decisions extended Bach’s spirit of invention across the full tonal range of the modern piano, offering listeners fresh perspectives on familiar structures.
The midpoint of the set, Variation 16, composed in the style of a French Overture, offered a natural moment of reflection and reset. Lim shaped it with stately breadth, drawing grandeur from the weight of the opening dotted rhythms without exaggeration. He allowed the inherent architecture of the variation to assert itself. Ceremonial gestures unfolded without undue grandiosity.
As the mood gradually deepened in the second half, a more introspective tone began to take hold, with Lim emphasizing a quieter kind of drama. Nowhere was this inward turn more arresting than in Variation 25, the set’s only Adagio. Here, Lim cultivated an atmosphere of profound stillness, each phrase seeming to emerge out of silence and dissolve back into it. In its suspended sorrow and chromatic tension, with smoldering rather than burning dissonances, his rendition recalled earlier moments of Bach’s music, such as the yearning ‘Erbarme dich’ aria from the St Matthew Passion – a shared world of fragile lyricism and profound inwardness.
From the stillness of Variation 25, Lim let the music gradually reawaken, without abruptness or rhetorical signaling. In the quicksilver textures of Variations 26 through 29, he restored a sense of playful energy, though the brilliance now felt tempered by the inward journey that had preceded it.
The culminating Quodlibet, Variation 30 – by design a playful interweaving of familiar melodies within a contrapuntal framework – emerged with affectionate irony. It seemed to glance back over the entire traversal and, most poignantly, toward the opening Aria itself, now a ‘known’ entity and, in spirit, not so distant from the other remembered songs that animate Bach’s affectionate farewell. When the Aria finally returned, Lim played it with an even greater sense of introspection than at the beginning: a fragile thread of memory, softened by all that had come before.
Despite his limited experience, Lim was able to convey the central place of Bach’s music within the musical canon. His nuanced touch and expressive phrasing recalled the elegance of Couperin and the Italianate grace of composers like Scarlatti. At the same time, he infused the variations with a Romantic sensibility foreshadowing Chopin’s Études, evident in his lyrical shaping of lines and subtle dynamic inflections. This was an assured, vital and unmistakably personal statement. Decades from now, when his Goldberg Variations will almost certainly sound significantly different, Yunchan Lim may well look back with pride at the younger self captured on Friday night by Stage+ (click here).
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Pianist Yunchan Lim at Carnegie Hall © Chris Lee