Pianist Kim Saehyun looks beyond virtuosity after Long-Thibaud win

For 19-year-old pianist Kim Saehyun, the year since his Long-Thibaud Competition victory has been a period of rapid expansion, both in music and beyond it.

In 2025, at 17, he won the competition in Paris by unanimous decision, sweeping the audience, press jury and Paris prizes as well. About a month later, he performed at a peace concert marking the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day at the Arc de Triomphe. Since then, he has toured internationally while pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees concurrently at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory of Music in Massachusetts.

“It’s been a time when I could experience a lot, both musically and beyond music,” Kim said. “Through performing, after winning the competition, I was able to have conversations and connections I couldn’t have had before, and to meet musicians who inspired me in so many ways. It’s been a really meaningful stretch of time.”

He has spent part of that stretch on his first album, released under an exclusive contract with Warner Classics. It pairs Chopin’s Op. 25 with a program of Gabriel Faure. It’s effectively a record about Paris, the city where Kim gave his first European performance in the winter of 2023.

The album opens with Faure’s “Apres un Reve” and closes with Charles Trenet’s “En Avril a Paris,” in Alexis Weissenberg’s arrangement — a chanson Kim loved long before he had any real reason to program it.

Kim brought the Trenet chanson to his teacher Dang Thai Son, whose response was wary. Some pieces, his teacher told him, can be learned, but this one has to be lived, absorbed from years inside French culture. Kim prepared and played it for him anyway. His teacher seemed surprised, calling it a little odd, but told him: “You can play it anywhere.”

In his earlier study of Chopin’s Etudes, Kim wrote a short haiku for each one, putting into words the images he associated with the music. He has since moved away from that practice.

“Etude by etude, I moved past that structure,” he said. “Now it’s more about being free — following whatever the day, and that inspiration, brings.”

The relationship has flipped, in a way, he added. The more he’s performed the Etudes, the more it’s the music itself that now hands the inspiration back to him, not the other way around.

The change reflects a broader shift in how Kim approaches Chopin. When he played the Etudes at the Long-Thibaud Competition, he felt a greater need to maintain a certain speed and structure. Now, he said, he is more willing to slow down and allow the music greater freedom.

“There comes a time when you stop trying to fill something and start trying to empty it,” he said.

That idea also informs how he thinks about his teacher, whose Chopin playing Kim says he loves. It is a blend, he says, of the Polish and French approaches to the composer, between the more restrained approach of Artur Rubinstein and the greater freedom of Alfred Cortot.

The experience of making his debut album has also given Kim a greater appreciation for the work that happens beyond the stage. Unlike a live performance, recording gave him time to scrutinize the piano, sound and editing, and he wanted to remain closely involved in those decisions.

Kim will celebrate the album release with a recital on Sept. 6 at Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul, opening with Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in G major, followed by Chopin’s “Barcarolle” in F-sharp major, and closing with the complete set of Chopin’s 12 Etudes, Op. 25 — the same etudes at the heart of the new album.