22-year-old pianist shapes 100-minute all-Mozart program drawn from music that moved him to tears Lim Yunchan performs in a concert with Camerata Salzburg on Monday at Lotte Concert Hall in Jamsil, Songpa-gu, eastern Seoul. (Moc Production) Pianist Lim Yunchan closed a five-concert, all-Mozart tour of Japan and Korea at Lotte Concert Hall on Monday, alongside Camerata Salzburg under Masato Suzuki.The collaboration was Lim's own idea.The 22-year-old, who in 2022 became the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, proposed the series to Camerata Salzburg, the ensemble long resident at the Salzburg Festival and Mozart Week, on a single condition: that the music be all Mozart.The program paired two concertos from 1786 — No. 25 in C major, K. 503, and No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 — with the concert aria "Ch'io Mi Scordi Di Te," or "That I Should Forget You," K. 505, sung by soprano Im Sunhae. The soprano, a noted interpreter of baroque and classical song, shares a clan with Lim — the Pungcheon Im — a kinship he noted. Their surnames, however, diverge in English: his is spelled “Lim,” while hers is “Im.”The concert fell in a year thick with Mozart: 2026 marks the 270th anniversary of his birth, and orchestras will return to him repeatedly over the coming months. Lim came to the music from a more personal place. In a program note, he wrote that Mozart had moved him to tears on a handful of occasions — among them the operas "Cosi Fan Tutte" and "The Marriage of Figaro," as well as the two concertos he played Monday. Soprano Im Sunhae (left) and pianist Lim Yunchan perform in a concert with Camerata Salzburg at Lotte Concert Hall in Jamsil, Songpa-gu, eastern Seoul. (Moc Production) "Ch'io Mi Scordi Di Te," the aria that opened the second half, held a particular meaning. It had comforted him through a difficult stretch last year, he wrote, and the memory of weeping to it had set the project in motion.Lim placed the C-major concerto first and the C-minor after intermission, with the aria between them. The sequence let the evening darken by degrees — from the brightness of No. 25, through the aria, into the shadow of No. 24.The orchestra moved with the clarity that has long marked its Mozart. But what drew the ear, again and again, was the pianist's left hand.The right hand sang. Its runs were polished and even, each note clear and distinct. The left carried the feeling — and kept carrying it even off the keys, moving in the air.Mozart's bass writing is structural, marking the beat and holding the harmony, but Lim played it as more than accompaniment. There was something old in the way he played. In Mozart's own day, concertos had no conductor on a podium; the soloist led the orchestra from the keyboard, playing and directing at once.The cadenzas were the evening's most private moments, the music turning inward. With the orchestra silent, Lim played on at length, drawing on cadenzas by earlier pianists: Friedrich Gulda's for No. 25, Edwin Fischer's for No. 24.In the stretches where the soloist rests, Lim did not simply wait. He kept turning to the players and moved with them, taking the orchestra's rhythm into his body.Lim returned to the stage for an encore with Im. Before beginning, the pianist rested his hands on the open fallboard, waiting until the audience stopped recording and lowered their phones. Once quiet returned, Lim accompanied the soprano with the lightest touch. As the music drew to a close, a phone rang, and he glanced up with something like regret — as if for the music, and for the singer beside him.When it ended, much of the hall rose to its feet.The evening had asked something unusual of Lim — not a single concerto, dropped into an orchestral program, but a whole night carried alongside an orchestra and a singer. It was both an expectation and a challenge, and he rose to meet it.And in a year when many will turn to Mozart, his cycles ahead — sonata sets at Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall, recitals at the Musikverein and the Concertgebouw — might be not just a tribute, but also a reminder of why audiences keep returning to the composer in the first place. Pianist Lim Yunchan (front left) and conductor Masato Suzuki (front right) greet the audience after all-Mozart program with Camerata Salzburg at Lotte Concert Hall in Jamsil, Songpa-gu, eastern Seoul. (Moc Production)