Hee-Young Lim / Philippe Muller DUO

 

DUO

 

Hee-Young Lim / Nathalia Milstein RUSSIAN CELLO SONATAS

RUSSIAN CELLO SONATAS

Hee-Young Lim / London Symphony Orchestra / Scott Yoo FRENCH CELLO CONCERTOS

The young South Korean cellist Hee-Young Lim won her first competition at the tender age of 11 and has been racking up honors ever since. 

It's little wonder. As she showed at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater on Saturday night, Lim, now 20, is a deeply gifted musician with a full, singing tone, near-flawless technique and a natural lyricism that infused virtually every note she played. 

Performing entirely from memory, Lim clearly had little use for the theatricality that other wunderkinder often indulge in; in fact, she seemed almost self-effacing onstage, and her playing always favored elegance over indulgence. At first, she almost seemed too well behaved; Boccherini's Sonata in A, No. 6, which opened the program, was decorous to a fault. But she quickly moved into more complex depths with Debussy's Sonata for Cello and Piano in D Minor -- a mercurial, elegantly savage work that she brought off with insight and quiet power.