At the end of last month I missed one of the best proms this year: Yunchan Lim playing Beethoven, Bruckner and Tüür.
Lim is just twenty but already has an international reputation. He has a Beatles haircut and is a one-man Korean boy band playing with amazing manual dexterity. He won the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition two years ago – the youngest winner in the competition’s sixty-two year existence. It is held every four years in Texas, coinciding with Presidential election years either by accident or design. Like the Olympics winners are awarded gold silver or bronze. There have been sixteen contests to date and eleven medalists from the Soviet Union and, after 1990, Russia. The UK have only been in the frame once, when Barry Douglas from Northern Ireland won bronze in 1985.
The Times doesn’t publish all my letters. Here is one that didn’t make the cut.
To what extent Putin’s revanchist foreign policy will succeed is an unknown quantity. What I do know is that a generation of Russia’s intelligentsia has left their mother country. Recently I read novels by Andrey Kurkov and Boris Akunin; the former now lives in Ukraine and the latter in London. I have no doubt this migration of talent is mirrored in engineering, science and technology. The only people happy to return to mother Russia seem to be their spies.
I might have included music.
Yunchan Lim plays a Steinway in all the YouTube films I have seen and I assume he plays any Steinway on the stage so long as it is in tune. Other musicians have their own instruments except for timpan players – a timpan is technically an instrument because it has to be tuned unlike a drum. True or false? By the way, I stumbled on a 1974 edition of Call My Bluff on BBC Two recently and what a shot of nostalgic narcolepsy to watch Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell playing so uncompetitively. The latter was the third and penultimate Lord Glenavy. There’s a bit about him two years ago – 50th Birthday Party.
Yesterday I listened to Yunchan Lim’s winning performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 on YouTube. It has had 15 million views – unusual for a piece of classical music. Here’s an excerpt from a performance at the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
If you know Patrick Campbell’s writings well, “A goss on the potted meat”, from The P-P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell, is a must for garden croquet players. He still makes me ache with laughter.
Mitsuko Uchida has 3 or 4 Steinway concert grands that travel to different halls and are tuned onsite by a dedicated technician. A Steinway technician once told me that another pianist did not send her own piano to the hall but did sit as it was being tuned and asked for adjustments to the felts to increase the brightness of the sound. Not every subsequent pianist was happy with the result.