Young piano star Yunchan Lim makes a ferocious New York Phil debut

Classical music has no shortage of young stars. South Korean Yunchan Lim made waves last year when he won the Van Cliburn Piano Competition at age 18, the youngest winner in the history of the competition. As his rather exuberant programme bio for this concert pointed out, his performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 at the competition went viral on the internet and is now the most-viewed recording of the work on YouTube.

Happily, Lim has plenty to offer beyond internet hype, and his debut with the New York Philharmonic showed that he is an artist capable of considerably more than the usual technical fireworks. Not that the pyrotechnics weren’t there — he attacked Rachmaninov’s imposing chords with ferocity and clarity, and took the octaves in the coda finale with reckless abandon.

Too often, this concerto can seem like nothing more than a vehicle to show off how fast and how loud a pianist can play. But Lim was at his best in the quieter moments of the piece, voicing Rachmaninov’s long melodies with elegant restraint. He took the piece at a deliberate, almost trance-like pace, with judicious rubati that made the piece sound fresh. At times his tempo and phrasing choices seemed too deliberate — his encore, a Chopin nocturne, veered towards the eccentric — but there’s no doubt he has thought through every one of his musical choices. Young stars may be common, but interesting artists like Lim are much rarer.

He was well supported by conductor James Gaffigan, who provided warm, sensitive accompaniment that could surge into moments of lush symphonic beauty as needed. An orchestral arrangement of Valentin Silvestrov’s Prayer for Ukraine was appropriately poignant, with hushed strings and whispered woodwinds, but it was Prokofiev’s rarely played Third Symphony that allowed the orchestra to shine.

It’s one of Prokofiev’s more extreme works, opening with tolling bells and discordant chords. Much of the music comes from his opera The Fiery Angel, which was never performed in his lifetime, and it has a strange, ghostly atmosphere. It takes a conductor as astute as Gaffigan to make sense of the work, and he brought a sinuousness to the score to counteract the violent brass and percussion episodes that permeate the work. It remains one of Prokofiev’s less accessible works, with meandering stretches of harmonic modulation, but the demonic finale provided a visceral thrill.

★★★★☆

nyphil.org