In June 2022, aged just 18, Yunchan Lim became the youngest winner of the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The remarkable charisma of his playing—combining a mastery of keyboard colour with a technique that is by turns fiery and scintillating—can be heard in his live performance during the competition’s semi-final of the complete Liszt Transcendental Studies, released by the Steinway & Sons record label. For the final, he astonished the jury with his performance of Rachmaninoff’s notoriously demanding Piano Concerto No. 3. Born in Siheung, Korea in 2004, Yunchan Lim chose aged seven to take piano lessons as his after-school activity. He entered the Music Academy of the Seoul Arts Center the following year. Then, aged 13, he auditioned and won a place at the Korea National Institute for the Gifted in Arts where he met his teacher and mentor, Minsoo Sohn. He entered his first international competition the following year, winning second prize and the Chopin Special Award in the 2018 Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists. He distinguished himself in further competitions, becoming the youngest, at the age of 15, to win Korea’s IsangYun International Competition. After his Van Cliburn win, in 2023 Lim made an acclaimed appearance at London’s Wigmore Hall, followed by a repeat of his triumph playing Rachmaninoff’s Third with the New York Philharmonic, a performance praised in The New York Times both for its poetry and unexpected humour. Having made recordings of solo piano works by Beethoven and Liszt (Young Pianists of Korea 2020, Vol. 3) and a recording of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon (2022), in 2023 he signed an exclusive contract with Decca Records.