★★★★☆
When a major artist performs third-rate music, it’s either going to be a trifling act of self-indulgence or a stunning revelation. It took me three listenings to work out which this was.
Tchaikovsky wrote 12 piano pieces for each month of the year for publication in serial issues of a St Petersburg magazine. The editor appended a poem to each piece without the composer’s involvement. That much is verified fact. Now Yunchan Lim, in a sleeve-note, comes up with a fable relating how the suite describes the last year of a man’s life, a gradual letting-go. Tchaikovsky, who was in the thick of composing Swan Lake at the time, had almost two decades still to live and no pressing thoughts of mortality. I am uncomfortable with the Korean pianist’s false narrative.
In the January segment of The Seasons he veers close to the edge of kitsch
And what of the musical interpretation? Yunchan Lim, winner of the 2022 Van Cliburn competition, is the most fascinating, ethereal pianist to emerge in more than a decade. So far, he has not put a finger wrong on record in epochal releases of Rachmaninov and Chopin.
In the January segment of The Seasons he veers close to the edge of kitsch, but that’s Tchaikovsky’s fault more than his. In March he offers playing of weightless wonder, a feather on melting snow. June is somewhere between hope and gloom. August is a helter-skelter scamper, a flight from something, possibly reason. October is a soaring cloud of genius, Rachmaninoff’s favourite encore. The last two months deliver a resolution, not entirely convincing.
Yunchan’s playing, dazzling at times, is at odds with his verbal imagination. On third hearing, his performance is deeply satisfying, unconnected to any agenda. You won’t be disappointed.
