The Well-Tempered Ear

Yunchan Lim’s Chopin etudes are the best ever

PLEASE HELP THE EAR. IF YOU LIKE A CERTAIN BLOG POST, SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD A LINK TO IT OR, SHARE IT or TAG IT (not just “Like” it) ON FACEBOOK. Performers can use the extra exposure to draw potential audience members to an event. And you might even attract new readers and subscribers to the blog.

By Jacob Stockinger

If you haven’t yet heard the new bestselling recording of Chopin’s etudes by pianist Yunchan Lim (below), what are you waiting for? It is a new treat each time you listen to it — as The Ear has many times.

When it comes to piano etudes, which is the higher Everest: Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes or Chopin’s two sets of Etudes.

To the Ear, etudes by Liszt (below) are flashier and revel more in sheer physical technique, while Chopin’s significantly shorter etudes — no less technically challenging or difficult — are deeper and revel more in music that serves specific techniques such as octaves, double-thirds, sixths, arpeggios and so forth.

To The Ear, Chopin (below) is clearly a superior creator of piano etudes, and is more ingenious at integrating music into the technical challenges.

I have listened to wonderful recordings of all the Chopin etudes by Maurizio Pollini, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Claudio Arrau, Louis Lortie, Garrick Ohlsson, Murray Perahia, Jan Lisiecki and others.

I don’t think any pianist would even think about recording all the treacherous etudes without proving that they have mastered them. So, unsurprisingly, all the sets are good. Very good. And you might even find individual etudes that outdo Lim.

But as a complete set, Lim’s is better.

Simply put, to these ears, Lim’s set is the best ever.

That is no small achievement for the 20-year-old, mop-haired South Korean who in 2022 won the last Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at 18 and has since gone on to have a meteoric global career.

He has already been recorded live playing his prize-winning performances of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (found on YouTube) and of all of Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Etudes (on the Steinway label).

But the Chopin etudes are his first studio recordings for Decca, which has signed Lim as an exclusive artist.

And what a debut it is.

Lim is a natural. He makes whatever he plays sound as if that is exactly how it is supposed to be played. He reminds me of what Zubin Mehta once said: “If you want to hear how a piece should sound, listen to Rubinstein.” 

Same goes for Lim.

Lim finds new things in the scores, but they never sound distorted or forced. Listen to the left-hand voices, selections of tempi, shading, volume control and tone. At all times Lim makes the technical challenges he has mastered serve the music.

In the YouTube video at the bottom, just listen to his sensitive reading, with transparency and sublimely subtle rubato, of the famous “Tristesse” Etude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3, in E major, which Chopin viewed as one his very best melodies. 

Chopin would approve.

My only disappointment is minor. Advance publicity said the recording would be comprehensive and include the less virtuosic but very poetic “Three New Etudes”  that were published posthumously — just like Arrau’s and Lortie’s recordings do. But no such luck. We fans will just have to wait for another disc.

The Ear sure hopes that Madison audiences soon get the chances to hear Yunchan Lim live in both recitals and concertos.