REVIEW: Pianist Yunchan Lim takes Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a fresh direction

Pianist Yunchan Lim is on fire.

Just 20 years old and still in studies at the New England Conservatory, he is the youngest-ever winner of the gold medal at the prestigious Van Cliburn Competition.

This season has seen celebrated performances with orchestras in Paris, Berlin, New York, Lucerne, London, and Washington. And his recent performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto was named by the New York Times as one of the top 10 performances of the year. His Facebook fan page has tens of thousands of followers, old and young.

On Friday evening, in a recital as the La Jolla Music Society’s artist-in-residence at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, he offered a rendition of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” that, as his Gen-Z Facebook fans might put it, “hit different.”

In their critical reception during the past half-century, the “Goldbergs” have had much the same evolution as Bach himself: in 1955, when Glenn Gould recorded the first of two noteworthy recordings, most music dictionaries listed Bach as a talented, dutiful workhorse from a large musical family.

The “Goldberg Variations” were seen, likewise, as a massive edifice, one to be negotiated, not loved. Since that time, as the public and scholarly estimation of the work and its composer have has grown, countless performers have turned to them, always with the goal of further discovering and illuminating the depths therein.

On Friday, Lim charted a bold approach, one that risked sacrificing some of what Bach’s music has been, in search of what it might become.

To begin with, the standard notion that Bach’s musical texture is primarily an elegant coexistence of lines was largely abandoned.

Early on, this was problematic. The Aria and the first several variations seemed to be marred by an emphasis on Lim’s hands, rather than Bach’s counterpoint.

Vertiginous changes in dynamics interrupted melodic arcs, obscuring the motivic imitation so central to Bach’s writing. Multiple voices in one hand blended into fistfuls of color, and perplexing emphases on accompaniment figures served to distract, rather than elucidate, the musical argument.

Yet, gradually, it became movingly apparent that Lim was working toward his own poetic concept — more an attempt to uncover new sonic resources in the piano than a lecture in contrapuntal technique.

For all his youth, Lim is a master of touch and weight; the textures that emerged over time were astounding in their variety and arresting in their emotional content.  Numerous choices by Lim helped this along, as repeats were transposed up or down an octave, and tempos marked by extremes in contrast. Dynamics were often applied judiciously to certain registers, which fused separate voices into fascinating new inner lines.

Those listeners familiar with Busoni’s transcriptions of Bach’s works will recognize Lim’s world, in which counterpoint sinks into dark pools of piano resonance, and Bach’s spellings are doubled to transform and broaden their sonic mass. Other choices were simply brilliant, as when Lim chose to swing, hard, the repeats in Variation 20, a stylistic nod to Couperin, whose music Bach knew well.

Lim is a powerhouse technician. In the “Goldbergs,” variations in strict counterpoint alternate with genre pieces and what Ralph Kirkpatrick called “Arabesques” —faster, athletic movements showing the keyboardist’s facility with crossing hands, ornaments, and passagework, like the Variation 14, incendiary in Lim’s reading.  The lasting impact of his performance was as a powerful renewal of the potential of Bach’s work as a springboard for future performance interpretation.

The evening began and ended with other music. Hanurij Lee’s “…round and velvety-smooth blend…” starts with an elegy — an effective exploration of the multiple shades of barely audible a pianist like Lim can elicit, contrasted with bracing, jarring writing that echoes Ravel’s “Scarbo.”

The encore, Liszt’s “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca,” showed Lim at his most mature, imbuing Liszt’s mercurial emotional language with depth and clarity.