Rach 4 redefined: Klaus Mäkelä and Yunchan Lim set a new benchmark at Seoul Arts Center

At Seoul Arts Center, the collaboration of the Orchestre de Paris with its Music Director Klaus Mäkelä and pianist Yunchan Lim promised an evening of high anticipation. The chosen programme, centred on Ravel and Rachmaninov, set the stage for a display of both orchestral refinement and profound soloistic insight.

The evening began with Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Mäkelä’s treatment of the score was meticulously detailed, producing a remarkably clear orchestral sound. The textures shone with a polished intensity; however, this precise, almost cool beauty arguably had a drawback. By focusing intently on perfect surfaces, the reading seemed to subdue the piece's inherent emotional depth, potentially transforming this moving tribute into something more like a glittering, yet ultimately empty, showpiece.

Any lingering qualms were briskly laid to rest by the ensuing traversal of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 4 in G minor. In Yunchan Lim’s hands the score emerged as a small revelation, conspicuously succeeding where so many have floundered. Most interpreters, when confronted with the work’s three interlocking conundrums, contrive to crack only two – jettisoning the third to keep the edifice upright. Lim, by contrast, supplied a solution of rare completeness: structure, sonority and stylistic poise were drawn into such elegant accord.

The first of these victories was structural. Where most interpretations either patch over the concerto’s formal gaps with inauthentic sentimentality or allow the work to splinter, Lim approached the score’s seemingly chaotic assortment of notes as if tracing a new constellation in the night sky. By connecting these unstable, scattered points of light with an unerring sense of narrative logic, he revealed the brilliant and compelling shape inherent in the music, forging a coherent arc – one of potential gathered, held in tense stasis and finally cataclysmically released – that makes profound sense of the work’s unconventional design.

This structural integrity was matched by an equally revelatory approach to its sonic architecture, solving the perennial problem of balance. Mäkelä sculpted the orchestral sound with such transparent layering that he created a vivid sonic stage for the soloist, a feat rarely achieved. The result was a performance that could accommodate both the breathtaking stillness of the Largo, where phrases dissolved into profound silence, and the explosive density of the finale, which built pressure with controlled, terrifying force rather than mere volume. The common issue of the orchestra swamping the piano, or vice versa, was simply non-existent.

Perhaps most impressively, the interpretation reconciled the work’s stylistic schizophrenia. Instead of choosing between its late-Romantic heart and its sharp, modernist vocabulary, the performers demonstrated their inseparability. Lim treated the jazz-inflected syncopations and chromatic riffs not as foreign bodies, but as organic, often volatile, transformations of the lyrical themes. Conversely, he burnished the great melodies with a modern, crystalline clarity, free of sentimental haze. By proving that these two idioms must operate simultaneously, this performance moved beyond a compelling interpretation; it established a new interpretive constant, a reference point that continues to reveal the unassailable logic of Rachmaninov’s vision.

After the interval, the orchestra’s Parisian identity came to the fore in Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The reading was notable for its cultivated elegance, from the stately opening Promenade to the smoky saxophone that imbued The Old Castle with a palpable atmosphere. The Great Gate of Kiev was conceived with an emphasis on nobility over sheer bombast, its grandeur unfolding with a controlled, majestic authority.

One departed convinced that the Mäkelä–Lim partnership has begun to forge its own grammar: structure without pedantry, brilliance without vanity, daring calibrated to the millimetre – a combination that, for once, deserves the overworked epithet definitive.