First, a personal declaration. Of the many hundreds of pianists I must have heard in more than 50 years of recital going, a multitude that has included many of the greatest names of the 20th century, none gave me more consistent pleasure or a greater sense of wonder than Radu Lupu. If ever a pianist’s appearance, especially in his later years, belied the character of his playing it was Lupu: that the intensely serious, heavily bearded figure who hunched over the keyboard in a way more appropriate to a seance than a recital could produce playing of such velvety tonal beauty was extraordinary enough; that such a beguiling sound world was allied to a mind of such penetrating musical intelligence sometimes seemed miraculous.
Lupu died in 2022, at the age of 76. He had retired from the concert platform three years before, and had ceased to make studio recordings some years before that. Decca, for whom he recorded exclusively for over two decades, released his complete recordings in 2015, and with that comprehensive box, one thought, the legacy would be complete. But now, to mark what would have been the pianist’s 80th birthday, the company has produced this wonderful surprise: six discs made up of unreleased studio sessions and BBC, Dutch and SWR radio tapes, dating between 1970 and 2002, of works that Lupu otherwise did not record.
The set begins with Mozart’s G minor and E flat piano quartets, for which Lupu was partnered in 1976 by members of the Tel Aviv String Quartet, in performances of such pristine studio quality – Lupu at his most inward in the slow movements, dazzlingly buoyant in the finales – that it’s mystifying they have never previously been released. A 1990s disc of Schubert sonatas – the unfinished C major D840, and the D major D850 (in a surprisingly downbeat, almost angry performance) – complements the Lupu Schubert already in the catalogue, while a sequence of Haydn and Mozart sonatas from the 1970s and 80s ends surprisingly with Schumann’s Études Symphoniques, complete with its five “posthumous” variations.
If those discs remain on more or less familiar Lupu territory then much of the rest of the set does not. He recorded little Chopin, but here is a thrillingly vivid (if not always technically immaculate) performance of the B minor Scherzo, while Lupu learned Bartók’s Out of Doors suite especially for the 1969 Leeds International Piano Competition, of which, half a century on, he remains the most celebrated winner. More uncharacteristic still is Copland’s Sonata, fierce and majestic, from the Aldeburgh festival in 1971, while Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition sees Lupu making a rare venture into the Russian repertory; it comes from a 1984 Dutch broadcast, his tone noticeably rawer, almost strident at times. In general, though, the recording quality serves the exemplary playing well enough; every track is a treat.
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