When, last month, the preposterously gifted twenty-year-old pianist Yunchan Lim played Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, in Costa Mesa, California, the crowd responded with one of the loudest noises I’ve lately heard in a classical venue. The previous week, Lim’s thirty-year-old colleague Seong-Jin Cho gave an all-Ravel recital at Disney Hall, and concertgoers emitted a similarly full-throated roar. In both cases, the average age of the audience was markedly lower than the concert-hall norm. The two events gave me a tremor of hope about classical music’s eternally precarious future.

Lim and Cho both come from South Korea, and people of Korean heritage make up a good part of their considerable fan base. Both grew up in nonmusical families and became spontaneously obsessed with the piano. Neither gravitates toward the flashier aspects of the virtuoso life style. Beyond that, their personalities diverge. Cho is an elegant performer who produces a preternaturally beautiful sound, although he sometimes goes against type by staging unexpected expressive interventions. Lim is a volcanic talent who renders scores by Liszt and Rachmaninoff as though he had composed them himself. He, too, resists being pigeonholed: his major offering this season is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the antipode of Romanticism. I saw him play the work at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, in La Jolla; in April, he will bring it to Carnegie Hall. Truth be told, neither Cho’s Ravel nor Lim’s Bach proved entirely persuasive. It’s healthy, however, for younger artists to test their limits.