The gentle Aria at the start of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations can be inward looking, aching with loneliness. But in the pianist Yunchan Lim’s hands, on Friday at Carnegie Hall, the music sounded brisk and bright. In its early going, Lim’s rendition of the “Goldbergs” was studious and polite, for an effect that was a little like a gifted child giving a recital.
Just 21 and boyish, Lim even looked the part on Friday, in white tie and tails — throwback attire for today’s young pianists — as if playing dress-up in his father’s tux.
When he announced that he would be touring with the “Goldbergs,” I thought it might be a kind of dress-up, too. While the work, which consists of the Aria and 30 variations on its bass line, has moments of extroverted virtuosity, mostly it requires preternatural reserve and concentration over some 75 minutes.
It’s not usually the province of rising dynamos like Lim, who soared to fame after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto. But as he has shown again and again, while he has the technique to offer speed and power, his true gift is for restrained poetry.
At first, that poetry felt hard to come by on Friday. During repeats of sections in the early variations, the ornamentation had a look-what-I-did showiness rather than deepening the musical line. The fourth variation’s crispness had a certain stiffness, and the fifth was taken at such a clip that its rush of hand-crossing notes was murky.
But from then on, the fast variations were exhilaratingly precise. Subtle use of the sustaining pedal helped Lim explore the shadowier harmonies in the sixth variation. He began to use distinctions in repeated material — as, in the 10th variation, taking the first section more quietly the second time — to give a sense of thinking things over, of evolving.
This became a Bach of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. The 11th variation started at the barest murmur; in the second section of the 13th, Lim almost seemed to be stopping phrases in midair. The 14th variation was a burst before the long Andante canon of the 15th — here an adolescent exposure of painful emotion — and a weighty rather than sprightly 16th.
Lim was even more characterful, and took more risks, in the work’s second half. In the 19th variation, his playing in the upper reaches of the piano had the pristine sweetness of a snowglobe. His 23rd blurred the beat to evoke pure texture.
In the great 25th variation, as in the 13th, he drew out the music until it felt almost lost, but his focus kept the line together enough to build tension without breaking. The variations that followed had a palpable sense of release from that tension, but also surged headlong toward the 30th, which was delivered as mature, calmly joyous songfulness.
At the end of the “Goldbergs,” the Aria from the beginning is repeated, note for note, after over an hour of variations. Ever so slightly slower, ever so slightly more veiled, Lim played it like someone who has traveled a long way and recalls his past: distant yet loving, without section repeats this time, not lingering.
On Friday, I assumed that the increasing depth of Lim’s “Goldbergs” during the concert might have been him settling in. But after, I wondered if he’d had the intention, or at least the instinct, to turn Bach’s journey into the account of a young man growing up.
In this context, his brief encore was witty and also quite moving: the bass line of the Aria, shorn of its famous melody, played by the left hand alone. This is the material from which the 30 variations germinated, both the beginning of everything and the stark, simple end.
Yunchan Lim
Performed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.
