Three Great Pianists Part II - Radu Lupu
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• David Hackett
Radu Lupu often gave the impression that he had wandered onto the concert stage by accident. Thick-set, unsmiling, plainly dressed with long, straggling hair and a slightly wild beard, he would barely acknowledge the audience as he shuffled towards the piano. Many music critics likened him to a disenchanted bear. Others suggested he resembled a shaman, a wizard, a Jeremianic prophet or even an early twentieth century anarchist. Very few thought he looked like a pianist.
He would sit, not on an elegant, padded piano stool with height-adjusting side levers, but on a plain, high-backed chair. And rather than lean intimately over the keyboard (à la Glenn Gould), Lupu would recline back in his seat and adopt the posture of a painter about to set to work on a new canvass. Which perhaps to an extent he believed he was.
But then would come the miracle – he would start to play. For Alex Ross of the New York Times, it was “difficult to describe exactly what happens when Radu Lupu’s fingers meet the piano. There are no flamboyant gestures, dazzling technical feats, startling interpretive notions. No grand personality hurls the music at the listener. What happens first is that the piano gives out a narcotically beautiful tone; solitary lines or open intervals take on a luminous sheen. Subtle dynamic shadings, lucid inner voices, well-turned rhythms and songful phrasings follow — beyond that, nothing, or something uncannily like the music itself.” To many it was an almost otherworldly process. In the words of Fiona Maddocks, Lupu appeared to take “aural dictation from the ether.”
His playing had to be heard to be believed, and better live, even while he seldom allowed recordings of his public recitals. Every performance was a unique event to him, every piece a musical story to be told. He could be passionate and barnstorming, but more often than not it was his astonishing delicacy that moved audiences. He made every piece sound completely lucid, through a combination of faultless articulation and deeply felt understanding of the music.
Above all, his playing was organic. It was as if the piano had become fused with his soul and was his primary means of communication. “Never could music come nearer to speech,” wrote one critic after hearing him play. For another, Lupu “has that mysterious something that goes beyond technique, erudition and general musicality to reach into the sensibilities of listeners.”
Outside the concert hall he was a man of few words, even to colleagues he was on good terms with. He almost never gave interviews (for "fear of being misunderstood or misquoted” as he put it), disliked all publicity and self-promotion, and much of his private life would remain a mystery to the outer world. But whenever he touched the keys of a piano, this same very private man would appear to open up his innermost being to the most intense public scrutiny.
So who was this fabulous yet enigmatic pianist? Radu Lupu was born into a Jewish family in the Romanian city of Galați in 1945. His musicality was immediately evident, with his parents claiming that before he could talk, Radu communicated by singing. He was also creative. Even when he started learning the piano aged six and showed a real aptitude for it, his goal in life was not the concert stage: “I regarded myself as a composer”, he said in 1970. “I was sure, and everybody else was sure, that one day I would become a famous composer.”
And though it may now be hard to believe, much of this related to Lupu’s early technical struggles on the piano: “I found even the most elementary rudiments of piano technique very difficult”, he once acknowledged, “because this needed great self-discipline, and as for years I had imagined that I would one day become a composer, I had always felt that this sort of perfection wasn’t going to be needed.”
Lupu would eventually change his mind about that in his mid-teens, at around the time he was admitted to the Bucharest Conservatory. Two years later he gained a place at the Moscow Conservatory, a tough schooling which probably helped him forge his prodigious technique.
Such was his meteoric progress that the one-time duffer was soon good enough to be winning three major piano prizes in the late 1960s – the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (held in Texas, 1966), the George Enescu International Competition (Bucharest, 1967) and finally the Leeds International Piano Competition (1969). “I really do not like competitions at all,” Lupu confessed afterwards: no-one was more surprised than him by his success.
It also set his life on a brand-new course: “I became a celebrity overnight” he said, “and I just had to face it. Before then, I must have felt subconsciously that I needed time to develop. I was very strong-minded, and all I felt was that I must cancel those concerts which didn’t seem to fit in with my studies. I didn’t want to be under pressure to learn something special for this or that concert. But after the Leeds my life changed completely. It’s unknown territory, there’s a lot of pressure, and one doesn’t know if one will cope with it.”
But growing fame also allowed Lupu to gradually set his terms with orchestras and concert organizers, and to decide which piano music he now most wanted to focus on. Hence his nineteenth century repertoire tended to be Austro-Germanic with a particular focus on Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Mozart. For the twentieth century, he was more likely to play fellow east Europeans such as Bartók, Enescu and Janáček. Unlike Maurizio Pollini, he rarely played contemporary music, although he was the dedicatee of a piano concerto written by Polish composer André Tchaikowsky in 1971.
Andrew Patner, a Chicago-based author and journalist, was once brave enough to tease Lupu over the issue, telling him, “Maestro, I sometimes think that as you play fewer and fewer pieces, playing each of them better and better, that a time will come when you will play only one piece but your performance of it will be unbelievable.”
Lupu deadpanned in response: “how did you know?”
At times, Lupu appeared to do the minimum to get by. His manner often suggested lethargy and a mildly depressive nature, and he didn’t always look after his health. He could also be painfully modest. The only pianist he was ever heard to criticize harshly was himself. But those who got to know him invariably found him good company, a dry wit discernible underneath the shy exterior. The ‘cellist Stephen Isserlis would fondly recall Lupu’s “deep laugh[,] a constant in any conversation.”
According to Lupu himself, there was just one overriding rule to his playing – that "everything in music comes from the head… If you have any concept of sound, you hear it in your inner ear. All you have to work for is to match that sound on the instrument. The whole balance, the line, the tone, is perceived and controlled by the head.” It was for much this reason that he found he could initially read a new piece “more easily away from the instrument.”
In relation to this, Lupu would always be obsessed with tonal balance. ”Don't underestimate this unbelievable control of his playing,” his fellow pianist Mitsuko Uchida once said of him. For Lupu himself, physically touching the keyboard was “a very individual thing determined by the colour or timbre you hear and try to get, the piece you are playing, the phrase.”
In other ways, Lupu could be disarmingly honest about his own personal shortcomings, not least because his profession didn’t always suit his temperament. “There are times when I don’t feel in the mood to play, and yet my schedule says I must play”, he admitted. “This means I should possess great discipline, but this is a quality I will never, never have. I am a great romantic. I have to feel everything I do; it must be spontaneous.” The problem was synching his creativity with his creative duties: “There are days when I would love to make a record but I have no sessions planned, others when I’m down to make a disc and I would like to get out of it – microphone fright, you could call it,” he said in 1976.
Although much of Lupu’s playing was about musical instinct rather than technical theory, he was notoriously painstaking about producing recorded music. Despite turning out over twenty recordings for London’s Decca Studios between 1970 and 1993, it wasn’t always a happy alliance. One rookie sound engineer recalled that “unknown to me, nobody else at Decca wanted to work with [Lupu]. He was notoriously difficult, neurotic, insecure and in a constant state of frustration. In my ignorance, I only believed my job to be spotting fluffed notes, marking them in the score and doing a retake. Fluffed notes were the least of Lupu’s concerns. They usually began with the piano and the Steinway technician filing down or administering a special liquid to hammers in order to equalise tone, brightness, dullness of each key. Lupu would play something and then ask, ‘is the F# too bright? I’ll play it again!’ The technician would go back into the studio and spend the next 30 minutes with the guts of the piano on his lap.”
Even during his best years, Lupu was never the most prolific performer. But when ill-health began to affect him in his sixties, his appearances became even scarcer. Lupu would often cancel several concerts at short notice, but then suddenly turn up at some unexpected venue to offer his services. Desperate not to miss him, people would come rushing from miles around.
After collapsing and spending several months in hospital in 2018, he knew his time was running out. He gave his final performance in Lucerne in June 2019, playing Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto in A Major. “Radu played like an angel”, according to Stephen Isserlis who also featured in the concert, “a soft angel, saying farewell, perhaps; but everything so natural, so simple – Mozart as he should be played (but so rarely is).” Just as memorable was the encore he signed off with – the heartfelt first Intermezzo from Brahms’ op 117 set.
And that was it from Lupu, as three years later, in April 2022, came the sad news of his passing. We can only be grateful that he left behind as much of himself as he did. So many of his recordings are revelatory. He had a way of making even a familiar piece sound like something you were hearing for the first time.
And as for Lupu’s own ideal pianist? “I would look for someone who was telling me a story I could believe, someone who combined presentation, technique, knowledge, culture, sincerity, projection and personality – genuine playing.” He could so easily have been describing himself.
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com