As soon as the 2022 Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas, was over, news travelled across the Atlantic that the latest winner was very special indeed. Over the following year or so,Yunchan Lim’srecitals in Europe and afirst disc for Decca (of the Chopin Études), together with recordings that documented his performances in the competition, of Liszt’s Transcendental Études in his semi-final recital, andRachmaninov’sThird Concerto in the final, confirmed that the reports had been no exaggeration: he is the real thing, a once-in-a-generation talent. Now Decca has reissued the Fort Worth concerto performance, but with the sound significantly cleaned up and rebalanced, and the wonder of Lim’s playing if anything enhanced. What is immediately striking is the sheer confidence and poise of everything he does, and the overriding sense that there is never any doubt about the direction in which this majestic concerto should be taken; it’s hard to believe that this is the performance of an 18-year-old.
Needless to say, every technical challenge in the keyboard writing seems to be effortlessly negotiated, yet the brilliance is never an end in itself; it is always part of a bigger picture, without ever diminishing the thrill of such astonishing command, so that the way the unadorned melodic lines of the slow movement are phrased becomes just as telling as the way in which the densest flurries of notes are negotiated. Just perhaps in the finale, when Lim can seem too headstrong for his own good, does his performance betray his age; otherwise it deserves a place alongside the finest versions of this concerto on disc, from those by Rachmaninov himself and Vladimir Horowitz to Martha Argerich and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Despite Decca’s remastering, though, the sound is by no means perfect; some orchestral detail remains too distant, and the string sound is sometimes scrawny and undernourished. Normally such shortcomings might preclude a five-star recommendation, but Lim’s playing is so astonishing it’s almost irrelevant.
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