The New York Times: Review: Yunchan Lim, Teenage Piano Star, Arrives in New York

The New York Times
By Zachary Woolfe

The 19-year-old musician made his New York Philharmonic debut with a powerful yet poetic performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.

“He plays like a dream,” we say about musicians we like, meaning simply that they’re very good.

But when I say that Yunchan Lim, the 19-year-old pianist who made a galvanizing debut with the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, played like a dream, I mean something more literal.

I mean that there was, in his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the juxtaposition of precise clarity and expansive reverie; the vivid scenes and bursts of wit; the sense of contrasting yet organically developing moods; the endless and persuasive bendings of time — the qualities that tend to characterize nighttime wanderings of the mind.

This dreamy concert was among Lim’s first major professional performances outside his native South Korea, though he is already world-famous for this concerto. His blazing account of it secured his victory last June as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition’s youngest-ever winner, and the video of that appearance has been viewed millions of times on YouTube.

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Photo Credit: Chris Lee