Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 (Live from the 2022 Cliburn Competition)

Here’s the performance which instantly placed Korean pianist Yunchan Lim “on the map”. In 2022, with this scintillating account of one of the most physically demanding concertos in the repertoire, the then 18-year-old became the youngest winner to date of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The opening is deceptively low-key, Lim playing its Russian Orthodox chant-like theme with a patrician calm, characteristic of Rachmaninoff’s own performances, many captured on record (and available to stream). There’s just time to admire how the Fort Worth Symphony, under the baton of Marin Alsop (herself chair of the competition jury), truly blend Rachmaninoff’s rich colours before you realise that Lim has smoothly accelerated to a speed all the more remarkable for the clear articulation of every note and phrase. To prepare for this astonishing performance, Lim listened to some great past recordings, including those of the great pianist composer himself: “I used to listen to a lot of Rachmaninoff's recordings,” he tells Apple Music Classical, “as well as Volodos and Kissin’s performances of Piano Concerto No. 3. In the end, I realised that the most important thing was to not focus on how to play it, but to become Rachmaninoff’s soul itself.” How to play it is, of course, vitally important for performing a work that places such huge demands on a virtuoso pianist’s technique. But, as Lim explains, the question of “how” should serve a more vital end: “You should not think one-dimensionally when practising—for example, focusing on your left hand being quieter, your right hand being more melodic, or thinking about stepping on the pedal, without inspiration. Instead, if you imagine leaves falling in the wind, losing yourself in the waves, falling in love, and the deepest sorrow of unrequited love, then your hands will immediately be playing full of inspiration. It’s most important to practise with poetic imagination.” The phenomenal clarity of Lim’s technique, brilliant yet always serving the music’s expressive needs, shines even more brightly in the epic cadenza. Yet he also does full justice to the sweetly beguiling theme Rachmaninoff presents shortly before and after this remarkable episode. Lim also provides appropriately consoling warmth in the second movement. In the finale, he is—if anything—in even more dazzling form, whether at the start, taken at an incredible speed, or in the scintillating passage immediately before the chorale-like theme, the emotional heart of that movement. Lim plays this with a true and well-earned sense of arrival. No wonder the audience explodes with such joyous rapture at the end.