Yunchan Lim 임윤찬 - LISZT OCTAVE HERO (Vision, Eroica, Wilde Jagd) 

Left on mutual terms - partly to start this channel, but also to pursue other piano-related projects/collaborations that I've been looking forward to for a long time. I want to really focus on creating piano content for YT, whereas the tonebase YT channel was not my main job there, I just worked overtime on it because it was really fun.

@@benlawdy Thanks for the reply. To me you were tonebase.

@tonebase got silly lately. Best for him to make his own channel

bruh i signed up to tonebase bc of Ben, I can't be the only one. Glad that you're posting again.

I watched your tonebase yunchan commentary a few times. I just kept learning and learning more. But the Listz?! I have disliked Listz for 80 years. Too much noise. It hurt my brain. And suddenly with yunchan I heard music. I sent for the disc and sometimes listen 2 or 3 times a day. I hear something new every time and it is so beautiful. Every single time. The more you want to talk about pianists the more I will listen. Bring it on! With many thanks

I’m referring to yunchan’s Carnegie Hall performance of Chopin’s op 10 and op 25. Bravo!

​@@tonyventura4605Today, April 19th 2024, Yunchan released those on Melon Music for all subscribers to hear. Melon Music is Korean's version of Spotify.

I don't know him personally, but every impression I get is that he's too in love with the music to burn out. Maybe he'll burn out from nonstop concert life, but that will probably be a blessing if/when it happens - because of the music he'll learn and record while not flying around the world all the time.

Hello twosetter :D can we get eddy and brett to see yunchan and make a video about him with sofie oui oui. That would be sAcRiLeGiOuS. (Maybe someone can post his playing on lingling40hrs i cant do it because i dont use reddit but that would be awsome if someone did it)

⁠@@benlawdy😮

I heard YUNCHAN almost not seeing piano but to see orchestra during all the playing time. I really wish more his videoes to be recorded.not only sound.. his gesture is reaally interesting too.... I still remember when he was staring orchestra at the CLIBURN.most impressing time. 😊

There is a recording of the live broadcast of his Saturday night BSO concert on YT. Excellent quality. I have to agree- I never thought he’d be able to surpass his cliburn performance of the Rach 3 but I liked it better in Boston.

@@hurricane_hazel yeah I just found that one, much better than my recording thankfully

That's nice to hear! I know it annoys others, but I'm also starting to use these Yunchan videos as a vehicle for exploring the music and considering other pianists/interpretations.

@@benlawdy KEEP DOING IT !! what a treat it is for us 💯💢 !!

He gets a 10 for technical brilliance but musically exhausting to my ears

Rach 3 in Boston? (I stalk pianist tour schedules) I'd love to know how that goes. I'm working on one last vid for the tonebase channel where I compare his Cliburn Rach 3 to one I heard in person last summer at Bravo Vail.

I have tickets that day too. 😂

Did y'all see he's doing Rach 2 with Alsop in Baltimore in April?

@@benlawdy I like to stealth audio record- I can send to you if the person next to me doesn’t cough the entire show.

@@benlawdy Can't wait for that one - there were some interesting critical comments... But meanwhile, thank you for this - love it!

Thank you - I'm getting a little faster at them and am investing in some tools that should automate aspects of the edit which are otherwise unbelievably tedious and time consuming.

@@benlawdy Yes, I see your photoshop tabs at 6:42 😉

@@Chopin-Etudes-Cosplay I was waiting for this comment! I also included some subliminal messages in the yunchan Feux Follets video for tonebase - when the old RU-vid interface pops up

Do you have a recording of his rach 2? Would love to hear it!

Thanks for your support! I told myself I need to finish this series before the next Cliburn rolls around...

I would like to know if Seong-Jin Cho or Yeol Eum Son ever received the same kind of celebration? I'm sure they're beloved in Korea as well, no?

So glad you enjoy my brain dumps! Yunchan's a boss, but also can't wait to make videos about other pianists. Pogorelich needs his own video (at LEAST one) for sure...

@@benlawdy Definitely!

Sorry it's taken me like two years to finally do this... two more videos coming on the rest of Yunchan's transcendentals (March and April target releases), but also starting to make videos about pianists not named Yunchan ;)

yay! we’ve been patiently waiting for the rest of your Yunchan review! 👏💕

@@marciahill4591 thank you for your patience!!

​@@benlawdy no problem. I'll wait for your other vids esp of Yunchan's. 🥳

Thank you! Just getting started here...

I've wondered that. But I also know he's very self critical and wasn't entirely satisfied with those Cliburn performances, so why would he want to relive them in such detail?? Also, he's got better things to do. Like memorize the entire Well-Tempered Clavier!

Ben, did you know you're a big celebrity in Korea? Everyone in classical music circles will eagerly watch this video and race to be the first one to translate it into Korean. That's how Yunchan will stumble upon your post and send you a warm, boyish smile with gratitude.

@@abee5612 Aw well that' flattering to hear. Yes - I hope someone does better than the Korean Google translate I used on this video ;)

@@benlawdy 😆

@@benlawdy yes you are right but imo at least one of his friends made him to watch a little clip of your videos. There is no way a gen Z (yunchan :D) miss these videos since they are so popluar

There's a RU-vid of Yunchan 'headbanging' to the Mephisto Waltz No 1 as he plays it.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Please don't suffocate!

Thank you for your comment and your support! Honestly, I didn’t care about the transcendentals either before I committed to researching them and realized how much more substance was there than I ever gave Liszt credit for. I’m very interested in Hummel. Of course his A minor concerto is a direct model for Chopin, but - like John Field nocturnes - we should appreciate it on its own merits and not just how it falls short of Chopin. But also Hummel’s biography was incredible, spanning both classical and romantic eras and being a pupil, peer, or mentor with just about every famous composer from both eras!

Field is no Chopin. His nocturnes are not memorable however pleasant they may be. Hummel was surpassed by Chopin but can withstand comparisons. But he did not compose one of the 8 or 10 romantic piano concertos that account for 90% of performances heard these days

You mean, Yunchan Lim?

Glad you found it, yes! The RU-vid algorithms are all-wise and ever-knowing! I'm jealous you got to hear his Etudes live. I tried to get tickets to his upcoming Carnegie performance way back in August, with no luck.

@@benlawdy Omg, his packaged subscrip. tickets were already sold out Before the single tickets sale in August last year 🤣I don't think in the Carnegie history such an incident like this had ever happened. I've never purchased subscriptions but for that particular recital, I had to get it. Every dollar worthy of a wise investment 😍👍🐾

​@dionysus4778 yeah I knew it would be impossible to get single tix and got the entire series, and so far really loving it ! The final concert of the series is going to be Choi seongjin's recital and I'm looking forward to that too! What a bonus 😊

@@animalsarebeautifulpeople3094 I donated the rest tickets, just got the packaged sub for Yunchan's recital only 😆🤪

@@dionysus4778 oh wow! 😅 for me I love being in the hall 😊 one of my most favorite places in NYC 💚

Also would like to share with you another pianist Kit Armstrong. He has a special view about Bach and Beethoven (sorry I can’t describe more clearly because I just started listening these from Yunchan… but found classical music so beautiful and interesting!)(another difficulty is language. Thanks for google translate.)

🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

I might try to snag some of that live stream and use a clip of it in the tonebase video I'm making... (so I can have "2022 v 2023 v 2024" Rach 3s)

@@benlawdy Great! However, for the 2023, the Vail concert was in an outdoor venue + Yamaha = meh... sound quality, so it'd be unfair to be in comparison with those. The best Rach 3, IMO, in 2023 was the May 11 concert at the Lincoln Center with the NYPhil last year. I went to all 3 concerts and that 2nd concert was totally out of this world! (first was due to the sound quality, when I sat in the choir section. Last one was ruined by someone's phone ringing, playing the trumpet in the 3rd tier, disrupted my train of listening thought) Anyway, I'm still looking forward to your opinions on those Rach 3's though. ^^

@@dionysus4778 it’s interesting because what I heard through the grapevine is that yunchan and James gaffigan (nyphil guest conductor) were not on the same wave length in New York, so yunchan was more inhibited in his interpretation. But maybe that was just the first night, and he was more comfortable the 2nd concert you mentioned. Obviously sound wise, New York was better - but I at least get to work with the professional recording, so it won’t sound like how most people experienced it who were there - with all the ambient sound that was coming from the road nearby. But the main reason the Vail performance is interesting, is it’s the first time Alsop reunited with Yunchan on THAT piece since the Cliburn, and I was able to get an interview with her. Also I interviewed three NYPhil members, and they talk about the May concert as well. Also, I accidentally captured yunchan doing lots of extra practicing on the Yamaha the day of the concert, so there will be lots of things to talk about!

@@benlawdy yeah, for sure we were all excited to see him reunited with Alsop in Vail! And it's quite true, the first concert could have been more on the same wavelength, when I felt the sound was not the best quality due to my choir seat. I still get goosebumps when I think of that night of the 2nd concert. 😭 I'll be in Boston for all 4 concerts next week! Can't wait to listen to him playing with the BSO, and what Yunchan has stored in his secret crystal ball... 🔮😍

@@benlawdy Not sure if you realize- Boston broadcasts their Saturday night performances- so on YT is a very good recording of the Saturday night performance. I am loving it!

My pleasure!

Glad you think so!

Thank you! It means a lot to know there are such receptive viewers out there. I was lucky to meet so many great pianists through tonebase and it's been very fun to develop these formats for communicating ideas about piano. As for my Reich performance - thank you! I had to learn it solo for a dance company once, and I nearly said 'no' because I was impossible. But then I discovered a way to practice it that ended up doing wonders for my hand/finger independence. I can still do it better than that performance... my 'phasing' happens too fast, and I lock into the next synchronization a little too quickly each time. I still practice it an octave apart on a single piano sometimes just as a warm up. One day I'll bring it back and make a video about it - I think every pianist should try it.

You are very welcome

Thank you!

You're so right with Ovchinikov! His recording is still the stunning best overall one for me, but unfortunately hardly known.

@@Swelterful Yes, It is still the set I go to. Ovchinikov mastered them.

Yes, for me this is the biggest thing classical concert pianists young and old, amateur or professional even, regularly miss in their conceptions and performances - especially in 19th-century music - where time-distortion is too often considered the sole means of emotional expression. It must be a systematic product of how pianists are trained, and it's definitely a minority of teachers and students who really emphasize so-called "structural" playing. Like you say, it's an aesthetic choice, and there's plenty of pieces where tempo fluctuation and rubato can be used to great effect, but why should that be the norm? I would think it should be the other way around. But classical musicians on the whole, especially solo pianists, seem ideologically opposed to a longer-term steady beat. Gould, of course, was the supreme antidote to this, and arguably "over-corrected" in the opposite extreme (although I love the overcorrections too). I'm working on a video about his Brahms D minor, which I argue was controversial less for its slow tempo and more for the draconian tempo uniformity Gould imposed on the whole piece.

Thank you and I plan to! They just take a long time to make.

Thank you for noticing :)

Thanks for watching! Yep, I enjoyed making those tonebase videos so much that I had to leave and try doing it on my own so I could focus on it more. Looking forward to finishing this Liszt/Yunchan series and moving on to other pianists. I only know a few of Nyiregyhazi's recordings (some the controversial Liszt performances), and I have watched that Independent Pianist video about Vallee d'Obermann. Of course the extremes in his sound and tempo choices are remarkable - actually, Pogorelich has something of that gigantic/shattering sound in his Wilde Jagd that you hear in Nyiregyhazi, although not nearly as deliberately out of proportion. At some point I'd like to go deeper into his biography and make sense of his eccentricities - I tend to appreciate the pianists who seem to be on a totally different wave length, but he's one I know less about. So at this point I'm not sure I have anything smart to say about it. I do hear a lot of pain in his playing, maybe even apocalyptic? He completely destroys any semblance of the music's form (thinking of Vallee d'Obermann). This isn't a journey through a Swiss landscape, or whatever, it's more like hell on earth - each phrase stands alone and doesn't contribute to some larger whole, you're just stuck in the morass of this phrase, or you're in the middle of an inferno in this other phrase. But if you buy into this aesthetic from the outset, it can be a real trip - like no other recording. Not gonna lie, I have a jaded side to me, having heard so many pianists play the same pieces in more or less the same way forever, and I have pianist friends who are similarly jaded - and a few months ago I found myself sitting around late at night with some of them and we put this recording on, and we were just so excited about it. But again, it came from a place of disillusionment with standardized ways of playing the piano, so I'm not sure I was really celebrating the recording on its own merits. Just some of my thoughts!

@@benlawdy so are you saying Tonebase channel is not really your own? I thought it was created and managed by you? I was wondering why you had uploaded the content on Yunchan on this channel. I guess you're trying to start out on your own? Anyway, a great content! as always as expected from you ~ ^^

@@benlawdywhoops meant to reply here

@@benlawdypogoreliches Scriabin sonata No. 4 is one of my most favorite recordings of all time

@@dionysus4778 Correct, I did not own the tonebase Piano channel! I was employed by tonebase as head of piano content for their premium platform and just started creating videos for their RU-vid channel to see what would happen. It worked! But, it wasn't mine... so here I am :)

Wow - the Chopinfiles... RIP 20 years... you're taking me back. Thanks for the well wishes. This was the Rach I probably posted (I'll put it on this channel at some point): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AIEpJ4dcWe4.html

I hope Decca is releasing Yunchan's Carnegie Hall performance. His Carnegie hall debut of Chopin's etudes op 10 and 25 are vastly superior to his previous performances on youtube. He did the op 25 when he was just15? And a slightly sloppy Op 10 last year. Yunchan was far better in his Carnegie hall debut tonight. He was rewarded with a massive standing ovation and many curtain calls, 4 encores - 2 Chopin nocturnes (the famous E-flat and the haunting C Sharp minor), the Etude #1 op 25, and Chopin's variation of the aria "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma.

@@trifonovfan9819 : Yunchan Lim’s 1st Decca release is being described as a studio recording. How lucky you are to have heard his Carnegie Hall performance! 😎🎹