Part 1: We've got a really terrific performance to hear [UPDATE:] two really terrific performances, actually!
"Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value."
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
Radu Lupu, piano; Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, David Zinman, cond. Live performance in the Sophiensaal, Munich, July 12, 1990
by Ken
Say, in our clip above (and the linked complete video), is this Radu Lupu being playful in the rondo finale of Mozart K. 459? Playful? Radu Lupu?
I guess we need to back up. We're supposed to be talking about Kurt Moll and Massenet's Werther -- unfinished business from last week's "We're going to be hearing Kurt Moll in his famously 'Unexpected French Role' -- so curtain up!," April 20, and " 'I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm still dreaming' (Do those poets know how to make an entrance?)," April 24. But, well, while progress is being made, that has bogged down a wee bit. And meanwhile I've found myself thinking about -- and listening to -- the Romanian-born pianist Radu Lupu, who died April 17 at 76.
I hadn't taken much notice of Lupu's passing. While I certainly have no lack of respect for a musician of his professional skills and career accomplishments, he wasn't exactly a favorite pianist of mine. I don't think he would crack my Top 50 list -- even a Top 50 list of pianists I've actually heard in performance. Actually, the live performances of his I recall attending were kind of, um (how to put this delicately?), stultifying. After the last of those, I kind of tended to pay less close attention to his career.
At some point, quite possibly a point when I meant to be plowing forward with matters relating to Werther and Kurt Moll, I happened upon a piece by The Guardian's Andrew Clements, "Radu Lupu: Five key performances," which begins:
The project unquestionably got off to a great start, because --
AT THE TOP OF ANDREW C'S LIST IS MOZART K. 459!
And I just plain love this concerto. It sits in this awkward chronological position: mere months before Mozart composed his most dramatic piano concerto: the D minor, No. 20. And here it is, just possibly Mozart's most congenial piano concerto. We've heard it before, in fact in a "hybrid Rudolf Serkin" performance, K. 459 having been, apparently, a piece for which that eminent exponent of Mozart's piano concertos (seen at right at what we might call "DG age" as opposed to "Columbia age") had a special fondness -- an utterly understandable fondness.
(There may be a sort of analogy here to the way Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has often overshadowed its predecessor, though the Fourth is in its own right a glorious creation. Really now, could a person hope to compose a "better" symphony than Beethoven 4? Or a "better" concerto than K. 459?)
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
i. Allegro
Rudolf Serkin, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in Kingsway Hall, March 1983
ii. Allegretto
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Columbia Symphony Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Apr. 28, 1961
ZINMAN TURNS OUT TO BE THE HERO OF THE MOZART K. 459
Really, it's worth watching the performance at the YouTube link, to see the rapt responsiveness Zinman draws -- with a minimum of visible effort -- from the in-the-zone young players of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. All three movements are buoyant, flowing, vividly colored, songful, except maybe for "songfulness" all qualities I rarely heard much of in Lupu's playing.
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
i. Allegro
ii. Allegretto
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 12:41; iii. at 19:43] Radu Lupu, piano; Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, David Zinman, cond. Live performance in the Sophiensaal, Munich, July 12, 1990 [Watch on YouTube]
I love that quote I placed at the top of this post: "Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value." But really? "Compelling," "spontaneous," "convincing"? And, for that matter, story-telling? Radu Lupu? I can hardly think of a performer whose playing at least sounds to me less spontaneous -- it usually sounds calculated down to the smallest, rigidest finger movement, producing a generally beautiful sound with excellent technical command and a wide dynamic range, but dynamics ranging pretty much in a single color, sort of like a black-and-white as opposed to color image.
Oh, frequently quite rich, even sensuous blacks and whites and everything-in-betweens, but distinctly monochrome. And the playing, while certainly not metronomic, in my hearing always sounded rhythmically overdetermined: every metric relationship laboriously measured and calculated and then repeated every time the same rhythmic pattern recurs, so that large chunks of music take on a quality of "etcetera, etcetera." When we get to see Lupu in video, this is pretty much what I see as well.
To be sure, possibly in reaction to Zinman's conducting, Lupu's playing in this Mozart concerto doesn't sound quite as tightly controlled. As I suggested at the start of the post, in the rondo finale he sounds almost playful. And in general, the things I don't expect to hear in his playing are very much the things that Zinman provides in such abundance. It makes for a happy collaboration in about as happy a piece of music as you're going to find.
WHAT ABOUT COLLABORATIONS WITH OTHER CONDUCTORS?
Eventually we're going to hear everything on Andrew Clements's list, but mostly we're going to defer it to a second installment. The only other work we're going to investigate is the other concerto on the list, and a very different one it is: the Brahms D minor Concerto, a piece we're run into a fair amount in the course of recent Brahmsian explorations focusing on the composer's long struggle to produce the one thing he felt he needed to produce in order to secure a place among the day's top composers: a symphony. For a good while, you'll recall, he thought he had it in the bag, with a work he began repurposing from a two-piano sonata -- until he decided he couldn't make it work and re-repurposed the thing into a piano concerto, presumably feeling more confident about creating a work of the scale this one was developing into from the safety of the keyboard.
Lupu did make a commercial recording of the Brahms D minor, in 1975 with Edo de Waart and the London Philharmonic. I couldn't remember whether I'd ever heard it (if so, it left no mark). I was able to give a quick listen to the first two movements via YouTube, and they're certainly very pretty, but without much sense of forward movement -- I should probably give it a more reasonable hearing, but I don't feel any great eagerness to return to it. The performance Andrew C directs readers to, presumably because he wants them to be able to access his suggestions, is a live recording from Tokyo, with the excellent NHK Symphony under that longtime stalwart Brahmsian Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013). But maybe "stalwart" isn't what he needed in a collaborator, as witness David Zinman's contribution to the triumph of the Mozart K. 459 performance.
BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15:
i. Maestoso
ii. Adagio
iii. Rondo: Allegro non troppo
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 21:30; iii. at 33:41] Radu Lupu, piano; NHK Symphony Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond. Live performance in NHK Hall, Shibuya, Tokyo, Nov. 4, 1994 [Watch on YouTube]
I should say that I've only listened to the performance very casually, and wouldn't presume to pass judgment at this point. Still, I can't say it grabbed me. However, rummaging around online, I found another Lupu Brahms D minor which seemed worth checking out. Like Lupu's commercial recording, it features the London Philharmonic, but with a very different sort of conductor: Klaus Tennstedt (1926-1998). It's always sketchy to hypothesize about the backstory of a performance without actual knowledge of how it developed. It sure sounds, though, as if it was Tennstedt who had the urge here to really plumb the depths (and breadths) of this dark, brooding, frequently crying-out-loud work.
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 24:11; iii. at 38:29] Radu Lupu, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Klaus Tennstedt, cond. Live performance in the Royal Festival Hall, Apr. 7, 1983 [Listen on YouTube (audio only)]
On first acquaintance I was bowled over by this performance even before the hushedly momentous first entry of the soloist, and I'm looking forward to getting to know the performance better. It could be one of the great Brahms performances I've heard, though as with the Mozart concerto, the great creative force seems to be the conductor.
The comments added to the posting of the Lupu-Tennstedt Brahms D minor led me to yet another Lupu performance, with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the excellent Jukka-Pekka Saraste (born 1956, now scheduled to take the helm of the Finnish capital's "senior" orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, in 2023), during his 1987-2001 tenure as the FRSO's chief conductor. And again on quick acquaintance it seems like a really nice performance -- a much more straightforward job than the revelatory Tennstedt one. But Lupu seems not only more comfortable here but even a bit freer than usual. We can see in the video that his hands aren't striking the keys with quite their usual stonelike rigidity. However, with the greater freedom seems to come some smudging of the concerto's treacherous passagework.
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 22:26; iii. at 35:14] Radu Lupu, piano; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, cond. Live performance in Helsinki (Finlandia Hall?), Apr. 4, 1996 [Watch on YouTube (in way better sound than an earlier posting)]
STILL TO COME: SCHUBERT AND SCHUMANN
And, I hope, some more settled thoughts generated by this project. Plus, well, who knows exactly what else?
GENERAL UPDATE (MONDAY EVENING): There's updating scattered through the post, now that I've been able to look at it and listen to some of the music in context. (Importantly, the clip of the Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" is fixed, so that it now plays the whole thing, not just track 1!) -- Ed.
"Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value."
-- Radu Lupu, quoted by the YouTube poster of a Lupu Brahms First
Piano Concerto with Jukka-Pekka Saraste (which we'll be hearing)
Piano Concerto with Jukka-Pekka Saraste (which we'll be hearing)
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
Radu Lupu, piano; Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, David Zinman, cond. Live performance in the Sophiensaal, Munich, July 12, 1990
[UPDATE: Not to worry, we're gonna hear the whole concerto -- which you can watch here. And by the way, note (especially if you look at the video) the average age of the poised German Chamber Philharmonic players playing their young hearts out! -- Ed.]
by Ken
Say, in our clip above (and the linked complete video), is this Radu Lupu being playful in the rondo finale of Mozart K. 459? Playful? Radu Lupu?
I guess we need to back up. We're supposed to be talking about Kurt Moll and Massenet's Werther -- unfinished business from last week's "We're going to be hearing Kurt Moll in his famously 'Unexpected French Role' -- so curtain up!," April 20, and " 'I don't know if I'm awake or if I'm still dreaming' (Do those poets know how to make an entrance?)," April 24. But, well, while progress is being made, that has bogged down a wee bit. And meanwhile I've found myself thinking about -- and listening to -- the Romanian-born pianist Radu Lupu, who died April 17 at 76.
I hadn't taken much notice of Lupu's passing. While I certainly have no lack of respect for a musician of his professional skills and career accomplishments, he wasn't exactly a favorite pianist of mine. I don't think he would crack my Top 50 list -- even a Top 50 list of pianists I've actually heard in performance. Actually, the live performances of his I recall attending were kind of, um (how to put this delicately?), stultifying. After the last of those, I kind of tended to pay less close attention to his career.
At some point, quite possibly a point when I meant to be plowing forward with matters relating to Werther and Kurt Moll, I happened upon a piece by The Guardian's Andrew Clements, "Radu Lupu: Five key performances," which begins:
We have the Leeds Piano Competition to thank for first showcasing the unique poetry of Radu Lupu’s playing: the young Romanian pianist won first prize there in 1969. That success launched his international career, but as the years went by he became a more and more reticent performer, both in the concert hall and on disc. Yet every rare opportunity to hear him was a reminder of just how special a pianist he was, in a repertory that extended from Mozart and Beethoven to Bartók and Janáček, and who was quite peerless in Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Here are just a few examples of his art.Ooh, there's that word: "poetry." Somehow a legend came into being that Lupu was a "poetic" performer. Maybe that made me curious to see which performances Andrew C was commending to Guardian readers. Which made me curiouser, because I was unfamiliar with most of the performances, and although I'm still in the midst of processing it all, I can say I'm enjoying taking a new look at, or listen to, Lupu. There's an abundance of interesting music-making here, and I may even be getting some sense of why performances that don't hold great interest for me may please other listeners.
The project unquestionably got off to a great start, because --
AT THE TOP OF ANDREW C'S LIST IS MOZART K. 459!
(There may be a sort of analogy here to the way Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has often overshadowed its predecessor, though the Fourth is in its own right a glorious creation. Really now, could a person hope to compose a "better" symphony than Beethoven 4? Or a "better" concerto than K. 459?)
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
i. Allegro
Rudolf Serkin, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded in Kingsway Hall, March 1983
ii. Allegretto
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
Rudolf Serkin, piano; Columbia Symphony Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Apr. 28, 1961
[UPDATE: Get the feeling that George Szell too had a thing for K. 459? How often do we get to hear him cherish a piece like this? (Listen to just the first half-minute of the Allegretto.) -- Ed.]In terms of drawing my attention, it didn't hurt that the Lupu performance of K. 459 is conducted by David Zinman (born 1936), from whom I don't ever -- in his long, productive career, over a wide range of repertory -- recall hearing a performance that was less than highly satisfactory. In the SC archive, in addition to Mozart we have from him Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Ives, and Bernstein. Here, chosen almost at random, are a couple of samples, involving orchestras with which he had long, productive relationships (music director in Baltimore, 1985-98; chief conductor in Zürich, 1995-2014):
BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125:
iii. Adagio
Tonhalle Orchestra (Zürich), David Zinman, cond. Arte Nova, recorded in the Tonhalle, Dec. 12 & 14, 1998
BERNSTEIN: Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"
i. Prologue; ii. Somewhere; iii. Scherzo; iv. Mambo; v. Cha-cha; vi. Meeting Scene; vii. "Cool" Fugue; viii. Rumble; ix. Finale
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, David Zinman, cond. Decca, recorded in Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Feb. 3-4, 1996
[NOTE: I think I've fixed the Symphonic Dances clip, which was playing only track 1. Note too, we've also had Zinman conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra with violinist Joshua Bell in a violin-and-orchestra West Side Story Suite (arr. William David Brohn). -- Ed.]
ZINMAN TURNS OUT TO BE THE HERO OF THE MOZART K. 459
Really, it's worth watching the performance at the YouTube link, to see the rapt responsiveness Zinman draws -- with a minimum of visible effort -- from the in-the-zone young players of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. All three movements are buoyant, flowing, vividly colored, songful, except maybe for "songfulness" all qualities I rarely heard much of in Lupu's playing.
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 19 in F, K. 459:
i. Allegro
ii. Allegretto
iii. Rondo: Allegro assai
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 12:41; iii. at 19:43] Radu Lupu, piano; Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, David Zinman, cond. Live performance in the Sophiensaal, Munich, July 12, 1990 [Watch on YouTube]
I love that quote I placed at the top of this post: "Everyone tells a story differently, and that story should be told compellingly and spontaneously. If it is not compelling and convincing, it is without value." But really? "Compelling," "spontaneous," "convincing"? And, for that matter, story-telling? Radu Lupu? I can hardly think of a performer whose playing at least sounds to me less spontaneous -- it usually sounds calculated down to the smallest, rigidest finger movement, producing a generally beautiful sound with excellent technical command and a wide dynamic range, but dynamics ranging pretty much in a single color, sort of like a black-and-white as opposed to color image.
Oh, frequently quite rich, even sensuous blacks and whites and everything-in-betweens, but distinctly monochrome. And the playing, while certainly not metronomic, in my hearing always sounded rhythmically overdetermined: every metric relationship laboriously measured and calculated and then repeated every time the same rhythmic pattern recurs, so that large chunks of music take on a quality of "etcetera, etcetera." When we get to see Lupu in video, this is pretty much what I see as well.
To be sure, possibly in reaction to Zinman's conducting, Lupu's playing in this Mozart concerto doesn't sound quite as tightly controlled. As I suggested at the start of the post, in the rondo finale he sounds almost playful. And in general, the things I don't expect to hear in his playing are very much the things that Zinman provides in such abundance. It makes for a happy collaboration in about as happy a piece of music as you're going to find.
WHAT ABOUT COLLABORATIONS WITH OTHER CONDUCTORS?
Eventually we're going to hear everything on Andrew Clements's list, but mostly we're going to defer it to a second installment. The only other work we're going to investigate is the other concerto on the list, and a very different one it is: the Brahms D minor Concerto, a piece we're run into a fair amount in the course of recent Brahmsian explorations focusing on the composer's long struggle to produce the one thing he felt he needed to produce in order to secure a place among the day's top composers: a symphony. For a good while, you'll recall, he thought he had it in the bag, with a work he began repurposing from a two-piano sonata -- until he decided he couldn't make it work and re-repurposed the thing into a piano concerto, presumably feeling more confident about creating a work of the scale this one was developing into from the safety of the keyboard.
Lupu did make a commercial recording of the Brahms D minor, in 1975 with Edo de Waart and the London Philharmonic. I couldn't remember whether I'd ever heard it (if so, it left no mark). I was able to give a quick listen to the first two movements via YouTube, and they're certainly very pretty, but without much sense of forward movement -- I should probably give it a more reasonable hearing, but I don't feel any great eagerness to return to it. The performance Andrew C directs readers to, presumably because he wants them to be able to access his suggestions, is a live recording from Tokyo, with the excellent NHK Symphony under that longtime stalwart Brahmsian Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013). But maybe "stalwart" isn't what he needed in a collaborator, as witness David Zinman's contribution to the triumph of the Mozart K. 459 performance.
BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15:
i. Maestoso
ii. Adagio
iii. Rondo: Allegro non troppo
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 21:30; iii. at 33:41] Radu Lupu, piano; NHK Symphony Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond. Live performance in NHK Hall, Shibuya, Tokyo, Nov. 4, 1994 [Watch on YouTube]
I should say that I've only listened to the performance very casually, and wouldn't presume to pass judgment at this point. Still, I can't say it grabbed me. However, rummaging around online, I found another Lupu Brahms D minor which seemed worth checking out. Like Lupu's commercial recording, it features the London Philharmonic, but with a very different sort of conductor: Klaus Tennstedt (1926-1998). It's always sketchy to hypothesize about the backstory of a performance without actual knowledge of how it developed. It sure sounds, though, as if it was Tennstedt who had the urge here to really plumb the depths (and breadths) of this dark, brooding, frequently crying-out-loud work.
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 24:11; iii. at 38:29] Radu Lupu, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Klaus Tennstedt, cond. Live performance in the Royal Festival Hall, Apr. 7, 1983 [Listen on YouTube (audio only)]
On first acquaintance I was bowled over by this performance even before the hushedly momentous first entry of the soloist, and I'm looking forward to getting to know the performance better. It could be one of the great Brahms performances I've heard, though as with the Mozart concerto, the great creative force seems to be the conductor.
The comments added to the posting of the Lupu-Tennstedt Brahms D minor led me to yet another Lupu performance, with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the excellent Jukka-Pekka Saraste (born 1956, now scheduled to take the helm of the Finnish capital's "senior" orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, in 2023), during his 1987-2001 tenure as the FRSO's chief conductor. And again on quick acquaintance it seems like a really nice performance -- a much more straightforward job than the revelatory Tennstedt one. But Lupu seems not only more comfortable here but even a bit freer than usual. We can see in the video that his hands aren't striking the keys with quite their usual stonelike rigidity. However, with the greater freedom seems to come some smudging of the concerto's treacherous passagework.
[i. at 0:01; ii. at 22:26; iii. at 35:14] Radu Lupu, piano; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, cond. Live performance in Helsinki (Finlandia Hall?), Apr. 4, 1996 [Watch on YouTube (in way better sound than an earlier posting)]
STILL TO COME: SCHUBERT AND SCHUMANN
And, I hope, some more settled thoughts generated by this project. Plus, well, who knows exactly what else?
UPDATE: After a brief tease of the Schubert impromptus to come, the next installment in the Radu Lupu remembrance was posted here.
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