Review: A dazzling Liszt CD from Cliburn winner Yunchan Lim

Last summer, at age 18, Yunchan Lim became the youngest gold medalist in the 60-year history of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The South Korean gave a particularly dazzling performance of Franz Liszt’s complete Transcendental Etudes, including some of the most challenging music ever composed for piano.

That performance, in Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall, has now been released on Steinway’s CD label (No. 30217).

You don’t reach the Cliburn finals without formidable technique, and Lim delivered laser-focused fingerwork at sometimes breathtaking speeds. But there was also depth and nobility of expression almost unimaginable in one so young.

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A bit of autopilot takes over patches of the virtuoso Mazeppa and Feux follets, but Lim brings rhetorical flair to the second movement Molto vivace, and real poetry to Paysage. It’s too bad some combination of the piano, close microphones and sometimes hard touch yields a steely tone here and there.