Pianist Lim Hyun-jung holds solo piano concert in Seoul

Here is a musician who left her native Korea to study in France at 13 and dreamed of becoming a Buddhist monk at 16.

This reporter met Lim Hyun-jung, a 31-year-old pianist who had a unique personal history, at a coffee shop in a hotel in downtown Seoul on Wednesday last week. She graduated from Conservatoire National de Région de Compiègne and the Conservatoire National Région de Rouen. She was the youngest student to study at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris at 17 and graduated the conservatory with the first prize.

“I really wanted to go to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris," she said. "I wanted to study at a school where many composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Faure, and Saint-Saens studied and taught music.”

Lim was once called a YouTube star. Her performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Flight of the Bumble Bee was very popular with some 250,000 views on YouTube in 2009. When she released her album of complete Beethoven’s sonatas in 2012, she became the first Korean to top the Billboard Classical Music and iTunes Classical Music Charts in 2012.

“Three years ago, I recorded all of Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier. It is a sort of a textbook for all musicians," Lim said. "I thought that people should have easy access to this and released my performance on YouTube for free instead of an album.”

This reporter was curious why she wanted to be a Buddhist monk. Back then, her mother also agreed with her. She said, “I wanted to pursue the freedom of life and essence in depth. I thought I could achieve the goal when I abandon the piano and become a monk," she said. "I could have sought essence and freedom with music. It occurred to me that I might be clinging on to religion for the sake of a goal, and I returned to the piano.”

She will have a solo piano concert at the Concert Hall of the Seoul Arts Center in Seoul on Feb. 4. Under the title of “The Sound of Silence,” the namesake essay that she published in Korea and France last year, she will perform Ravel, Schumann, Brahms and Franck.

“If 1,000 people come to my two-hour concert, I will be responsible for a total of 2,000 hours," the pianist said. "I should make the best effort to present beautiful hours for the audiences who trusted and allowed me to have their two hours.”

Unlike other female pianists who wear gorgeous dress on stage, she is famous for wearing a black jacket and a black trouser. She wore in black for this interview as well.

“I like wearing colorful dresses, but when I have a concert, I wear comfortable outfits that I designed," she said. "The focus in the concert should be not me but music and composers. I am just the messenger between the composers and the audience.”

For the pianist who pursues freedom and essence, there is no great goal music. “Music and my life are not apart," Lim said. "Playing the piano is part of my life like eating, washing and sleeping.”

Dong-Wook Kim creating@donga.com