This live sonata from Lupu at 29 is particularly one of the greatest Schubert recordings ever made. One of the greatest piano recordings ever made. One of the greatest experiences you can have in music....
I never heard Lupu live as an adult. I saw him at 11 or 12 do Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with David Zinman. I have much more vivid memories of Zinman's pre-performance talk, in which he claimed that Lupu agreed to a taped interview rather than talk on the stage. Zinman played the tape, and it was clearly Zinman doing what must ostensibly be a Radu Lupu impression, in which he answered with monosyllables that got increasingly absurd. Zinman and Lupu were apparently good friends - I'd imagine Zinman did the talking....
I may have heard him at 15 do Beethoven's 4th piano concerto, I'm not sure, but I should think by 15 my memories would be extraordinarily vivid, and I have no memory of it except that I saw a Beethoven 4 sometime around then. In college, I was supposed to hear Lupu with the National Symphony doing Mozart 24, again conducted by David Zinman, who always gets the best soloists. Lupu sadly cancelled, and instead we heard Peter Serkin. I remember that Zinman was wonderful - as his Mozart always was, while Serkin was perfectly adequate, but he was no Lupu.
Everybody who heard Lupu live said that recordings could not possibly do him justice. What must his live playing have been like then....
Like all the greats, the broadcasts of Lupu's live playing showed a player clearly different in substance from his great but sometimes over-meticulous studio recordings.
We tend to think of Radu Lupu as one of the great exponents of tradition - performing the most traditional Austro-German repertoire in its traditional contours, but doing it to an unparalleled standard.
But the truth is he was anything but a standard-issue Austro-German player. He studied not in Germany but in Soviet Moscow with the famed Heinrich Neuhaus - a Polish pianist who taught both Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, and in some ways he was much more a Gilels/Richter successor than Schnabel or Kempff. For all Lupu's fame in Schubert, Brahms, and Mozart, it was undermentioned that he sometimes brought a virtuoso ostentation that was a little detrimental to the spirit of these inward composers. I have to admit, among the Very Serious Pianist set, I prefer Brendel and Schiff. Neither of them have Lupu's gift. Lupu was a genius of the piano, Brendel and Schiff are 'merely' transcendent artists. But the skilled artisan has to work harder, see more, travel further. Brendel and Schiff are both much plainer pianists, and were forced to magnetize audiences by delaying their gratification until they see the whole view; whereas a genius like Lupu or Richter often seemed to play as a series of a million transcendent instants. Their performances don't have Lupu's thousand moments of infinity, but over spans of a half hour, they take us to infinity note by note, and by the end, they (I think) show us a longer, more secure view to the world beyond the world.
The contradiction of an artist like Lupu is the same as artists like Lipatti, Gulda, Casadesus, and Josef Hofmann. He's simultaneously a pianist completely at the service of the music rather than himself, and also a pianist whose uniqueness has absolutely indefinable magnetism. His other great teacher was the wonderfully named Floria Musicescu, who also taught Dinu Lipatti. Hearing Lupu was as though we got to hear Lipatti age. It is the same mix of self-effacement, poetry, quietude, and the hint of Romani ostentation.
So long as the classical piano repertoire exists, Lupu gets his own page in the chapter of our time. When a great pianist like Zoltan Koscis died, everyone was shocked, and yet the mourning was rather muted. Objectively speaking, Kocsis was without a doubt the better pianist. He could do literally anything. His repertoire surpassed Lupu's by an exponent. Kocsis never missed a single trick - digitally or intellectually. Intellectually speaking, he understood everything there was to understand a piece of music and played his whole repertoire right up to the fourth dimension in which the idiom is mastered. He was an awesome artist in every respect.
So why is the grief for Lupu so much more palpable? Because Lupu put listeners directly at that fifth dimension, where music is not just mastered for its own sake, but is there to put us in touch with still higher things.
Music is not just on earth for its own sake - it is there to express, and it takes on the characteristics of the person who expresses it. Kocsis was another genius. To an extent I'm not sure any pianist has ever reached, you heard every salient characteristic of every composer in every bar Kocsis ever played. But you can also hear the chip on Koscis's shoulder vividly - as though the psychological price of that work ethic was present for all to see. For all his mastery and understanding, Koscis couldn't help but put his furious temper in every bar.
Lupu was the quietest, most withdrawn of people, and those quiet moments of his playing were what we valued. In those many many moments when he brushed the keyboard like a celestial harp, he embodied the fifth dimension of music; where we see with our ears.
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