Review: Goldberg, Iceberg, it’s all kicking off at the Wigmore Hall

Last night, Yunchan Lim gave a recital of the Goldberg Variations the like of us no-one present had experienced. It was not just the playing – imposing as that was, and at speeds that would have got ten points on a London arterial road. It was the authority a Korean of 21 years old showed in a set that can sound repetitive, and the originality he brought to the invisible structure of play-pause-play.

Not a pin dropped in Yunchan’s silences.

Playing every single repeat (I think), the Van Cliburn winner covered the set in under 70 minuites, less time than it took Glenn Gould to adjust his piano stool. There were no affectation, except an occasional run of his left hand through his Beatles mop of black hair. At certain points, his hands – from the wrist down – seemed disengaged from the rest of his body.

He was, in a word, commanding. This was storytelling of Graham Greene calibre, assured and with a thread of mystery. Unsuspected melodies popped up from the left hand as the right was heading into space. There was so much going on in the penultimate Quodlibet that I wanted to ask him for a rundown but when I saw him backstage (more of that later) he did not seem to think anything he had done was remarkable.

Yunchan Lim preceded the Goldbergs with an apt five-minute meditation by a young Korean, Hanurij Li. He’s just 19.

There’s a repeat performance at lunchtime today.

This Saturday, the Icelander Vikingur Olafsson will play the Goldbergs at the Wigmore Hall, having changed his programme twice from Beethoven sonatas. There was considerable resentment among the Wigmore audience at his disrespect, both to fans who wanted to hear somethign different from him and to a younger pianist whom he might be trying to outshadow. Not good karma.