DongHyek Lim’s prodigious fingers and innate musicality mesh well in Bach’s Goldberg Variations, albeit with inconsistent success. The young pianist fares best in the cross-handed variations, where his supple, impressively varied articulation, brisk yet controlled tempos, and witty linear interplay convey plenty of character and toe-tapping buoyancy. Similar comments apply to canons at the unison, sixth, and octave.
However, Lim’s slower playing sometimes conveys a self-conscious, slightly mannered air. In Variation Seven, for example, Lim’s rounded-off phrases make a wet noodle out of Bach’s gigue rhythm, while his fussing with the canon at the fifth’s basic pulse and overstressing of the French Overture’s syncopations fail to put the notes in motion. And surely his elegiac pace for the Quodlibet (Variation 30) misses the music’s hearty “sing around the dinner table” subtext.
For the most part Lim does not link the variations by way of common tempo relationships and is not one for ear-catching ornamentation. Nor can I infer the logic behind Lim opting for certain “A”-section repeats over others. Lim’s unabashedly grand manner account of the Bach/Busoni Chaconne is more akin to Kissin’s pulling out the Romantic stops, in contrast to relatively Apollonian practitioners like Michelangeli, Rubinstein, and Tureck. The concert hall perspective characterizing EMI’s engineering gives full bloom to Lim’s large dynamic range.
