Johann Sebastian Bach - Goldberg Variations

An album released by Decca Records on February 6th presents Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, performed by pianist Yunchan Lim. It is a recording of a live recital from April 25th, 2025, at Carnegie Hall in New York, for which tickets had sold out months in advance.

Yunchan Lim is a 21-year-old South Korean pianist - he will turn 22 on March 20th. In 2022, at just 18, he won the Van Cliburn Competition, one of the most important in the world, becoming the youngest pianist in history to achieve this performance. From that moment, his prestigious international career began; in 2023, he also signed an exclusive contract with Decca, and the album you are listening to today is the fourth released under Yunchan Lim's name by Decca Records.

Yunchan Lim studied in South Korea; only in 2023 did he move to the United States to follow his teacher, who was going to teach in Boston. Yunchan Lim has already performed with major American orchestras and is beginning to be frequently invited to Europe and Japan as well. He is clearly a great talent, astonishing through his maturity and depth, beyond the evident flawless technique.

All these qualities come to the forefront when Yunchan Lim performs a masterpiece such as Bach's Goldberg Variations. Here is how he himself describes this repertoire choice: "For me, this work is the journey of human life told through music - the portrait Bach paints of existence itself. To perform such a work is the answer to the question of why I make music. I first heard the Goldberg Variations when I was eight years old; I was amazed by its grandeur and beauty, and it has remained close to my heart ever since."

The Goldberg Variations are a work in which the artist has great freedom to place something of himself within the interpretation - not to put himself before the score, but to clothe the score in his own universe. If in the case of Vikingur Olafsson and his 2023 album we saw the precision of the mind and the ice of Iceland, in the case of Yunchan Lim I see something else: the interpreter's modesty before a brilliant score, inward emotion, sensitivity and fragility - the human being facing destiny.

This is why Yunchan Lim's interpretation is valuable: because it answers a question that is on everyone's lips in this time when we speak about artificial intelligence - what does it mean to be human? What defines the human?