Beethoven: The Piano Sonatas – HJ Lim

Some pianists take thirty years to record the complete Beethoven sonatas. HJ Lim took, by her own account, about six months of actual studio time, and the results have the peculiar quality of a mind moving faster than its fingers can quite justify — either the most exciting thing you will hear all year or a symptom of something gone wrong. I lean toward the latter, though not without real admiration flickering at the edges.

Let’s dispose of the packaging first. Lim has grouped the sonatas thematically across four two-disc sets rather than chronologically. It’s an editorial gesture that promises revelation and delivers mostly inconvenience: anyone wanting to trace Beethoven’s evolution from the Haydn-haunted early works through the granite-hewn late style will need a printed guide and some patience with the shuffle. The conceit says more about the pianist’s self-image as an interpreter of ideas than about any illumination the listener actually receives.

The playing itself argues both sides of an old debate. Fearless, quicksilver musicianship in the line of the young Argerich? Or a young player mistaking agitation for depth?

The Pathétique answers unhappily. The first movement’s Grave introduction promises something searching, but once the Allegro arrives Lim starts pulling metric ground out from under the music — displaced accents, sudden accelerandos, a rhythmic profile that never settles long enough to breathe. Once or twice this raises the hair on your neck. By the fourth or fifth instance you can see it coming, and predictability is death to a musical device meant to surprise. The slow movement’s famous cantabile gets buried under a left hand too busy for its own good, and at one startling point she simply halves the tempo, as if losing her nerve about the melodic line’s ability to sustain itself unassisted. By the finale, fatigue has set in. Mine, not hers. She never seems to tire.

The Appassionata fares better, rhythmically at least. She reins in the impulsiveness and lets the architecture stand. But the slow movement, for all its sculptural clarity, never opens emotionally; you admire the voicing of the variations without being moved by them. The finale has craft to spare, articulated with a hardness that recalls Lisztian showmanship more than Beethovenian storm: caustic accents, italicized phrases, the music pushed toward demonstration rather than confession. Schnabel this isn’t, nor does it aspire to be Richter’s granite inevitability. It’s a young virtuoso’s Appassionata, all fingers and temperament.

The Waldstein exposes the same paradox in miniature. The passagework in the first movement is genuinely, enviably clean — every note in place, no smudging in the runs — yet the clarity comes at the cost of songfulness; this begins to sound like études rather than music that means something. The finale, with its rondo theme requiring legato sweetness, instead gets exaggerated dynamic swings and a rhythmic snap that borders on rock-and-roll swagger. Beethoven had wit, certainly. But this is anachronistic wit, imported from somewhere else entirely.

Curiously, the Moonlight — that most abused of all Beethoven sonatas, flogged by generations of drawing-room sentimentalists — comes off rather well in its outer movements. Lim’s touch in the opening Adagio is genuinely refined, pearled and soft, though her tendency to hold back the pulse fractionally, again and again, chips away at legato continuity until the melody feels more interrupted than suspended. The finale, by contrast, catches fire properly, with real vehemence and a sense of danger that suits the music’s volcanic character.

The late sonatas bring out her best and most troubling instincts simultaneously. There’s real fleetness here, an unwillingness to wallow — no small virtue given how often these works get smothered in premature reverence. But op. 109’s finale variations, and the Arietta of op. 111 above all, get driven harder and faster than the music’s serene unfolding wants; the same is true of the slow movement’s aftermath in op. 101. These are pages that ask for patience, for the sense of time itself dissolving. Think of what Schnabel or, more recently, Richard Goode find in that final variation of op. 111, the trills receding into something like silence. Lim seems almost embarrassed to let the music simply be still. op. 78, modest and often overlooked, suits her better: unpretentious, quick, alive. And the op. 27 No. 1, that strange formal experiment preceding the Moonlight, shakes and glitters with genuine electricity — one of the set’s clear successes.

The Hammerklavier, recorded with a brightness of tone that never turns steely, shows the most promising side of this young artist. Brusque, yes, occasionally under-pedaled where more resonance might help, but unsentimental in exactly the way this sonata demands, and reasonably alert to its contrapuntal density, even if the fugue’s full architectural weight still lies beyond her grasp for now.

Taken as a whole, this cycle documents a formidable technique and a temperament unwilling to defer to convention. Against the still-unsurpassed humanity of Schnabel, the structural intelligence of Brendel, or Goode’s unaffected songfulness, Lim’s Beethoven registers as brilliant, often thrilling, and finally undernourished.