The gentle Aria at the start of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations can be inward looking, aching with loneliness. But in the pianist Yunchan Lim’s hands, on Friday at Carnegie Hall, the music sounded brisk and bright. In its early going, Lim’s rendition of the “Goldbergs” was studious and polite, for an effect that was a little like a gifted child giving a recital.

Just 21 and boyish, Lim even looked the part on Friday, in white tie and tails — throwback attire for today’s young pianists — as if playing dress-up in his father’s tux.

When he announced that he would be touring with the “Goldbergs,” I thought it might be a kind of dress-up, too. While the work, which consists of the Aria and 30 variations on its bass line, has moments of extroverted virtuosity, mostly it requires preternatural reserve and concentration over some 75 minutes.

It’s not usually the province of rising dynamos like Lim, who soared to fame after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto. But as he has shown again and again, while he has the technique to offer speed and power, his true gift is for restrained poetry.

At first, that poetry felt hard to come by on Friday. During repeats of sections in the early variations, the ornamentation had a look-what-I-did showiness rather than deepening the musical line. The fourth variation’s crispness had a certain stiffness, and the fifth was taken at such a clip that its rush of hand-crossing notes was murky.

But from then on, the fast variations were exhilaratingly precise. Subtle use of the sustaining pedal helped Lim explore the shadowier harmonies in the sixth variation. He began to use distinctions in repeated material — as, in the 10th variation, taking the first section more quietly the second time — to give a sense of thinking things over, of evolving.