From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Shortly after Yunchan Lim, aged 18, became the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn Competition in 2022, white beards of the music business set off in search of the hidden source of this phenomenon. Yunchan played a Rachmaninov concerto with an introspective intensity and delicate beauty, alng with a near-inarticulate humility. All he wanted to do, said Yunchan, was sit on a mountain and think about Bach, ‘our greatest ancestor and our source’. Someone tracked down his teacher, Minsoo Sohn. An auction ensued between record labels for the man’s signature. This release is the outcome….
Minsoo Sohn was not obscure. In 2006 he won the Honens competition in Canada. He studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston and received much praise for a 2011 recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations. But he was never a charismatic presence and settled instead for a professorial life at the NEC and back in Korea, where he tutored Yunchan Lim. Now 50, Minsoo Sohn is getting his chance to show how to play Bach. Yunchan has warmly endorsed this recording.
It would be unfair to compare master and teacher. Yunchan is incomparable, Minsoo merely excellent. In the opening preludes he is meditative to near-stasis, almost pedagogical in his unfurling of Bach’s infinite variety. His articulation is so precise it could pass for a class demonstration. But there is poetry as well, and a great deal of pleasure to be derived from an exuberance that emerges as the set progresses. I am not aware here of a strong personality, but certainly of a performer who knows his Bach and is eager to put others on the path to knowledge. He is not a Friedrich Gulda or a Glenn Gould, but he’s the most appealing I have heard this century.
NL
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