{"id":3661,"date":"2025-10-09T22:57:29","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T02:57:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3661"},"modified":"2025-10-09T23:16:39","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:16:39","slug":"yunchan-lim-and-the-scent-of-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/10\/yunchan-lim-and-the-scent-of-nostalgia.html","title":{"rendered":"Yunchan Lim and the Scent of Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I am old enough to remember a time when famous pianists were great pianists. It is a topic I rehearse with pianists of my acquaintance who like myself began attending recitals in the 1960s. So we heard Argerich, Arrau, Cliburn, Curzon, Gilels, Horowitz, Moravec, Serkin, Richter, Rubinstein. Some of us (not me) were lucky to hear Kempff and Michelangeli, who were not regular visitors to the US. These artists were very different from one another \u2013 which is the point. They were personalities. (I also discover joking agreement that Pollini, though famous, was an exception proving the rule.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today \u2013 our discourse continues \u2013 anyone can be a famous pianist. Attire and social media play a disproportionate role. Lately, however, a couple of young Koreans \u2013 Yunchan Lim and Seong-Jin Cho — seem the genuine article: young pianists who might become both famous and great. They cultivate a personal style. And it seems driven from within, not imposed from without.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Lim has stumbled. His new Decca release \u2013 his first studio recording \u2013 is a mistake. The music is Tchaikovsky\u2019s The Seasons<\/em>: a collection of twelve cameos, one for each month. I learned about it from Dave Hurwitz\u2019s rambunctious \u201cClassics Today\u201d review on youtube<\/a>. \u201cThe tunes are broken up into globular little gestures,\u201d Hurwitz (who has a sense of humor) intones. \u201cA fetish for articulation draws attention to itself.\u201d The interpretations are crushed by \u201cmannerism and gesture.\u201d Amateur pianists \u201cwould do it better because they would do less.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My curiosity was aroused because I adore these little Tchaikovsky pieces. I have played them myself for decades. My favorite is \u201cOctober\u201d \u2013 the mind’s eye envisions an iconic Russian vignette of red and yellow leaves adrift above a solitary forest path.  A leisurely performance lasts five minutes. Lim\u2019s recorded performance lasts six minutes. His personal inflections, coloring every sad leaf, fracture Tchaikovsky\u2019s picture into a mosaic of subjective detail. As the playing, per se, is beautifully nuanced — Lim is unquestionably a poet whose every gesture is sincere — this failure becomes interesting. Why is \u201cOctober\u201d so fragile?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer, I would say, is that it exudes an intimate scent of nostalgia, a yearning for days bygone, that the 21-year-old pianist doesn\u2019t share. It is in fact an exquisite exercise in memory no longer accessible to composers and \u2013 given the nature of the times in which we now live — increasingly alien to performers and audiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earlier Romantic keyboard cameos of Schumann, though a likely influence on Tchaikovsky, can be wistful. But they\u2019re not stranded in the past. The composer who most parallels Tchaikovsky is Grieg, in his 65 Lyric Pieces<\/em> for piano. On a grand scale, there is the nostalgia of Rachmaninoff. The musical retrospection of these composers traverses long corridors of time past. It builds upon itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would call Tchaikovsky\u2019s \u201cOctober\u201d a double act of retrospection. It begins impersonally, with its forest tableau. But the middle section introduces a second, more personal voice, in dialogue with the tune at hand. This interaction rapidly drives to a piercing climax. A reprise follows. The morendo<\/em> (\u201cdying\u201d) coda — seven measures long, diminishing to pppp<\/em> — is tragic.  And so we have remembered both the forest path and a further stabbing memory occasioned by those falling leaves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can sample Lim\u2019s performance here<\/a>. An extraordinary version of the same music, in live performance, is that of Mikhail Pletnev, here.<\/a> Pletnev is an idiosyncratic artist invested in Romantic liberties of voicing and rubato. He is also, obviously, keenly cognizant of his Russian cultural inheritance.  I would be surprised if he were not a devoted reader of Russian literature and a connoisseur of Russian visual art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pletnev also excels in Grieg\u2019s Lyric Pieces<\/em>. Among the biggest of these is \u201cVanished Days\u201d (Op 57, No. 1). Its falling motion, in D minor, limns a chromatic haze of memory. Misted ascents in the left hand streak the tune as it recedes ever deeper into the past. An Allegro vivace<\/em> middle section, in D major, discloses an earlier memory \u2013 of youth. It gathers strength before sinking back into the minor. A fortissimo climax ensues, then a hopeless Adagio<\/em> terminus. You can hear Pletnev play \u201cVanished Days\u201d here<\/a>. Many another Lyric Piece<\/em> layers memories in similar fashion. The titles include \u201cHomesickness,\u201d \u201cFrom Days of Youth,\u201d \u201cGone,\u201d and \u2013 coming last — \u201cRemembrances.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grieg was born in Bergen. He remained there, late in life, even though the climate proved fatal to his health. There were 30,000 residents, with his Troldhaugen on the outskirts of town. He called his Norway \u201cnorth of civilization.\u201d This was said in frustration, but it was a lover\u2019s frustration. Rustic Norwegian dance and ceremony were his musical lifeblood. He also drew on Nordic myth. In 1905 he read (in English) Tchaikovsky\u2019s Life and Letters<\/em>  (the book by the composer\u2019s brother Modeste) and recorded: \u201cWhat a noble and true person! And what a melancholy joy to continue in this way the personal acquaintance established in Leipzig in 1888! It is as if a friend were speaking to me.\u201d Tchaikovsky wrote of Grieg\u2019s music: \u201cWhat enchantment, what spontaneity and richness in the musical inventiveness! What warmth and passion in his singing phrases, what a fountain of pulsating life in his harmonies, what originality and entrancing distinctiveness in his clever and piquant modulations.\u201d   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tchaikovsky died in 1893, Grieg in 1907. Then came the Great War \u2013 its senseless origins and peculiar ferocity. It introduced gas warfare, barbed wire, and the machine gun. It cost eight million soldiers\u2019 lives. At the Battle of the Somme, the largest military engagement in recorded history, eleven British divisions arose along a thirteen-mile front and began walking forward. Out of 110,00 attackers, 60,000 were killed in the first day. As early as 1915,\u00a0The New Republic<\/em> pertinently inquired, \u201cIs it not a possibility that what is today taking place marks quite as complete a bankruptcy of ideas, systems, society, as did the French Revolution?\u201d Americans were left pondering why men had died, as Ezra Pound wrote, \u201cfor a botched civilization.\u201d \u201cThe plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness,\u201d wrote Henry James, \u201cis a thing that . . . gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering.\u201d The cost to the arts has many times been surmised. The war discredited cultural nationalism. It erased nobility of sentiment. It cluttered with obstacles the long corridors of memory\u00a0<\/strong>that Tchaikovsky and Grieg had gently suffused with nostalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the reasons Charles Ives is the supreme American concert composer is that, unlike Aaron Copland, he was fortunate to come of age before World War I. He was profoundly invested in American cultural memory: the Civil War and slavery; the Founding Fathers and the Revolution. His memories of Danbury were pre-war memories: the circus band marching down Main Street, the sentimental songs of the parlor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is in the bygone parlor that The Seasons<\/em> and the Lyric Pieces<\/em> best belong. We can still reconnect to these pieces at Carnegie Hall — but they grow ever more elusive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can still remember my bedtime song, as a baby. My mother would sing it wordlessly \u2013 Grieg\u2019s Second Norwegian Dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some more piano blogs:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On \u201cripeness,\u201d Claudio Arrau, and Yunchan Lim, click <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On Sergei Babayan, click <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On Babayan, Danill Trifonov, and Yuja Wang, click <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On Vladimir and Bernie Horowitz, click <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On Alexander Toradze, click <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

–On Pedro Carbone and Spanish music, click here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am old enough to remember a time when famous pianists were great pianists. It is a topic I rehearse with pianists of my acquaintance who like myself began attending recitals in the 1960s. So we heard Argerich, Arrau, Cliburn, Curzon, Gilels, Horowitz, Moravec, Serkin, Richter, Rubinstein. Some of us (not me) were lucky to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-X3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3661"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3691,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions\/3691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}