J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations. Yunchan Lim, piano. Decca Classics 4871517. Total time: 77 minutes.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Yunchan Lim’s live recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations preserves the charge of a live room, Carnegie Hall. It places the listener at a natural distance, where the hall’s decay shapes phrase endings. That matters, because Lim does not play the Goldbergs as 30 framed miniatures. He treats them as one extended act of address — Bach as rhetoric.
If Wanda Landowska restored the work’s pulse on the harpsichord, then Glenn Gould fixed a commanding piano image of it. Lim’s contribution is different: He lets a controlled Romanticism into the line — not as indulgence but as a way of allowing counterpoint to sing without ceasing to argue.
Bach’s plan is strict. Beneath the Aria lies a 32-bar harmonic ground. The 30 variations fall into 10 groups of three; in each group, the third variation is a canon whose imitation interval widens step by step — until the final group breaks the pattern with a Quodlibet. The French Overture (No. 16) divides the work into two wings. Lim lets that architecture register as memory rather than diagram.
His pianism favors definition over mass. Clean attacks and releases keep voices legible without hardening the sound. Pedaling is used in short spans — enough to let harmonies tint one another while counterpoint remains readable. The repeats are where his narrative takes shape. Lim treats them as a second telling, not a photocopy: Balances are quietly reset, colors re-mixed, and at points the melodic center is nudged toward a different register. The cumulative effect can feel like stained glass: fixed panels, shifting light.
The Aria establishes the premise. Its line is restrained but never inert, and on the repeat the phrase returns as recollection rather than duplication.
The method becomes audible when Lim meets Bach’s strictest writing. Variation 3, the canon at the unison, is not presented as a tidy exercise. The lines are etched cleanly, yet on the repeat weight shifts and inner voices breathe, so imitation turns into resonance. Variation 5, the first virtuoso Arabesque, keeps that discipline at high speed. The hand-crossings are fearless, but articulation stays lean enough for each strand to read; brilliance serves the sentence rather than advertising the pianist. At this speed, the hall’s resonance can make the flame tremble — a candle stirred in a cathedral — but the flame holds, and with it the musical direction.
Variation 7 opens the door to play without dissolving the frame. Rhythmic spring comes from the upbeat, ornaments are pointed rather than plush, and the repeat is brightened — two-manual in spirit — until the music acquires a quick theatricality. Gesture, timing, and timbre become part of the rhetoric. That is why Variation 13 — the point at which that Romanticism becomes clearest — feels less like a break than an inward extension of method: Lim moves away from a dry, clearly separated attack, flexing the instrument’s resonance to reveal the cantabile core; the softening of the melody’s edges also summons a distant afterglow of the Aria.
No. 16’s Overture is a hinge, its dotted rhetoric clearing into a taut fugal stride that re-founds the second half. Later, Variation 20 courts the sharpest stylistic risk, tipping its dotted rhythms toward a more physical swing, an idea some listeners will find too pointed.
The adagio G-minor Variation 25 is approached as a test of continuity. Lim takes the tempo back far enough to let dissonance darken fully, yet the bass never stops walking. Some listeners will hear the breadth as a stretch for a single emotional color, but the line keeps moving, so each chromatic inflection is felt rather than displayed. No. 29’s chordal writing sounds engineered rather than merely loud, and the Quodlibet lets the everyday enter the argument — popular material surfacing as memory rather than punchline.
There will be dissent. Listeners who prefer a more uniform stylistic surface may hear the altered repeats as too interventionist, or feel that the room’s bloom slightly rounds the finest filigree in the quickest writing. Still, the approach makes more sense against a basic Baroque assumption. Keyboard texts of the period often functioned less as exhaustive scripts than as cues for realization — articulation, ornament, dynamics, even repetition left to convention and rhetorical intent. Bach — more explicit than many contemporaries — was criticized in the 1730s for writing down what some thought performers should supply. Read through that lens, as Klangrede (sound as speech), Lim’s second statements can register not as indulgence but as argument: The harmonic ground remains intact, the voice-leading stays intelligible, and the surface is allowed to speak differently each time.
The closing Aria completes the premise with understatement. Its opening sentence returns after the work has tested every possible way of saying it; tempo is held back, touch thinned, and the room’s resonance left as a gentle after-image. What remains is nostalgia — quiet, precise, and earned — less about looking back than about recognizing, in the simplest line, the changed person who now speaks it.
