With
no information about DongHyek Lim in the booklet for this
release, I was obliged to do a quick online search to find
out that he would have been a youthful 23 years of age
when this recording was made. Lim made headlines by refusing
to accept 3
rd prize at the 2003 Queen Elisabeth
Music Competition in Brussels. He has also been winner
and highly placed at numerous other competitions, and now
has a glittering concert and recording career. At 21, he
was the youngest pianist ever to sign a recording contract
with EMI Classics. After a
‘Martha
Argerich Presents’ CD and a recording which includes
the Chopin Sonata in B minor, this is his third album for
EMI.
To
sum up, I would say that this is indeed very much a ‘young
person’s’
Goldberg Variations. I don’t mean this
in a negative way, or to imply that Lim’s playing is immature
or lacking in some essential aspects. When you hear the
gentler variations, such as
Variation 13, or
15,
you can hear a kind of slinky expression, lithe and flexible,
which teases some gorgeous shapes from the music that you
probably won’t have heard in quite this way before. It
is with the livelier variations that the full athletic
pianism of DongHyek Lim is unleashed. Such variations as
12,
14 and so on will blow your socks off, but in the nicest
way. Lim’s touch is powerful, but his sound doesn’t dig
you in the ribs aggressively like some pianists. What I
like about his phrasing and emphases is that there is always
somewhere from which they grow, and a direction in which
they move. Rather than appearing as clunky, isolated accents,
Lim’s actions are almost invariably shaped with elegant
structure and form, even when all technical hell is breaking
loose. He will choose slower than usual tempi on occasion,
such as
Variation 19, which brings out the inner
voices with great expression and panache. Such variations
use
the sustaining power of the concert grand piano to full
advantage. One of the few to be truly extended is the wonderful
Variation
25, which at 5:39 is the longest of the entire set,
and very beautiful it is too. Several variations drive
on with more urgency than is often encountered,
Variation
27 and numerous others coming in at under a minute.
These never lose a sense of absolute control however, and
the only regret with some is the lack of a repeat – that
sense of Bach’s proportions being lost in a miniature which
the mind has too little time to take in properly. Clarity
of voicing is another strong aspect of Lim’s playing, something
you can convince yourself of just by playing the brief
magic of
Variation 24, whose crossing lines are
as complex as the rails at Crewe junction, and just as
accurately placed.
Lim’s
Goldberg
Variations come in at under 50 minutes, which is
a relatively brief traversal of this great masterpiece.
The reason for this is not massive haste, but non-observation
of repeats.
Sergey
Schepkin takes just under 72 minutes in his recording,
which in almost complete opposition to Lim uses all the
repeats. Neither interpretation is given to Gould-like
extremes of tempo, and both are very approachable. With
a well-known piece such as this, one would imagine that
relating a new recording to at least one other would
be fairly straightforward, but each time I brought out
the old favourites I found it harder to quantify Lim
in terms of alliances. His softer movements sometimes
have a little of that feel from the older Decca recording
by Andras Schiff, and, like Glenn Gould, you do hear
some distant vocalisations in the background of some
of these variations. I took to thinking there might be
some youthful connection with the younger Claudio Arrau,
whose 1941 recording has been made available on RCA,
but that didn’t work at all. Something of Sergey Schepkin’s
fire and attack can be found with Lim, but without that
difficult to define but clearly more hard-edged Russianness.
Lim is more feminine, his fireworks more sparkling and
transparent, and less block-like in comparison. In other
words, if you have the idea of this being ‘oh no, not
another
Goldberg Variations’ then you need to
think again. Arriving at the lyrical melodic forms of
the penultimate
Quodlibet the sense of integration
is made complete. If anything this is more so than with
the final
Aria which stands apart a little from
the rest; seeming more like a coda than a resolution.
I
for one have been highly impressed by Lim’s richness
of invention and individual approach, somehow achieved
without being in any way unnecessarily quirky or eccentric.
As
a ‘filler’ DongHyek Lim gives us the
Chaconne from
the violin Partita in D minor BWV 1004, as famously arranged
for the piano by Ferruccio Busoni. Quite correctly, Lim
does not play this as Bach, but gives us the full romantic
works. Building sonorities with triumphantly splendid grandeur,
this is not only a technical marvel, but an overwhelming
musical experience which makes one glad to be alive. Lim
never sounds anything like the proverbial ‘bull in a china
shop’ which can be the result with some players, but the
contrast between this and the
Goldberg Variations could
hardly be greater. Some of the effects Lim creates in this
music are quite magical, and you realise how sensitive
his pedalling is as well as having all that touch at the
keyboard. I can’t say I’ve been a great collector of versions
of this piece, but the one I’ve hung onto longest is Shura
Cherkassky’s live 80
th birthday concert at Carnegie
Hall in 1991. Comparing these two is like looking through
two different ends of a telescope, but what I appreciate
in both is a highly personal approach to colour, sonority
and shape. Cherkassky is almost wilfully individualistic,
and I would never hold this particular performance up as
in any way definitive, but at a little over 16 minutes
both young and old masters agree that it’s better to let
the music flow and move on rather than to linger over so
many precious moments. Coming back to the telescope analogy,
Lim has a way of magnifying the music into something truly
towering and monumental, without losing the sense of delicacy
and contrast which is essential for keeping the whole thing
together.
EMI’s
sound for this disc is excellent in my opinion. The piano
seems almost too distant to start with, but the sheer width
of dynamic in Lim’s playing make the microphone placement
and balancing nothing less than entirely logical. The power
in the Bach/Busoni is conveyed with a magnificent sense
of scale and impact, and with a delicious warmth in the
bass which is thankfully not over-emphasised. The delicate
touch and intimacy in this, and those gentler variations
of BWV988 draw you in and leave you wanting more. If I
encounter no more piano CDs on my desert island this year,
I’ll be happy with just this one.
Dominy Clements
see also review by Jonathan
Woolf (a very different opinion)
DongHyek
Lim (piano) 
