Chamber Music San Francisco: BWV 988

Pianist Yunchan Lim (photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, from the Chamber Music San Francisco home page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco presented the second of the ten programs in its 2025 season. This was the first piano recital in the series, performed by Yunchan Lim, recognized as the youngest person ever to win the Van Cliburn Competition. (This was in 2022 when he was eighteen years old.) Last night’s program consisted almost entirely of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of variations on an aria theme best known as the “Goldberg Variations.”

San Francisco has enjoyed many opportunities to experience performances of this major contribution to music history. Over the course of my writing, I have been fortunate enough to attend some of those events, which is why I can say, with some degree of certainty, that last night was the most disappointing of those experiences. Lim may have gotten all the notes properly under his fingers, but there was no sense of character in his delivery of the music.

Each variation in this collection has its own personality; and the overall “journey” is structured by a series of canons of increasing interval size, from unison to the ninth. The final variation then wraps things up with a multi-themed quodlibet. Sadly, for Lim, both the variations and the progression of canons came across as little more than “one thing after another.” Mind you, he had a solid command of all the notes; but he never seemed to grasp the expressive role contributed by each of those notes and the roles they play in the overall architecture.

The program began with “…round and velvety-smooth blend…,” composed by Hanurij Lee on a commission by Lim. The music was structured as two contrasting movements, but the overall rhetoric did little to characterize the contrast. Like the performance that would follow, this came across as little more than a “one note after the other" experience. Taken as a whole, this was an evening of prodigious technique; but any sense of expressive music never seemed to emerge from that technical infrastructure.