London’s Koreans helped ensure a sold-out Royal Albert Hall for the Proms return of Yunchan Lim on Friday night, paired this time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Kazuki Yamada. But Lim doesn’t just shift tickets. His huge social media following ensures waves of global attention for everything he does or that is written about him.
This Prom will achieve this for an unusual reason. Soon after Lim began Rachmaninov’s fourth piano concerto, a distant alarm started ringing in the Albert Hall. Red lights flashed high up. Yamada and Lim pressed on. At the end of the movement, Yamada left the podium and disappeared off-stage, leaving the musicians and audience uncertain. After about five minutes, though it felt longer, the red lights stopped, the alarm was silenced and Yamada returned, to applause and relief all round.
By all accounts, Lim was laid-back about it afterwards. I bet the BBC was less relaxed. But it did not seem to affect the pianist himself, who often showed how naturally he can conjure a willing audience into silence with his range and touch. Lim’s command of sound is wide, as his Korngold encore would also prove, but Rachmaninov’s fourth is not an easy work to project, especially in a vast hall. It veers, sometimes vertiginously, between weighty and whispering, and there are hints of composers like Ravel. The playing was wonderful, but a bit more spaciousness in the interpretation would have made it even better.
At the start, Yamada conducted a glisteningly clear account of John Adams’s propulsive foxtrot The Chairman Dances, which showcased the excellence of the CBSO’s wind and percussion sections. Then, after the interval, and in an already notably less crowded hall than before, came Berio’s Sinfonia, with its swirling and microscopically fragmentary mix of styles and cultures, written amid the reckless intensities of 1968.
Berio’s score for orchestra and voices, some electronically enhanced, could once feel like an obsequy for a dying western culture, with its homage to Mahler, and its allusions to Martin Luther King and absurdist theatre. Yamada and his musicians captured the piece’s hauntingly chaotic sound world and its troubled intensity. But, like so much else, Sinfonia has become a period piece now. It reconnects with an era in music that no longer exists, when composers and audiences were far more open to the disruptive and the new than they are now. The steady trickle of some remaining members of the audience towards the exits throughout the performance felt like testimony to that.