Beethoven Piano Concerto No 3 – Radu Lupu

Some collectors have been waiting a long time for these tapes to resurface, and Decca’s Eloquence label has finally obliged, unbundling Radu Lupu’s complete Beethoven concerto cycle across four discs that anyone who loves this repertoire will want to hear again — or discover for the first time.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor gets treated almost as an afterthought here, tacked onto a disc padded out with the 32 Variations in C minor rather than something more substantial. A pity, because the rendition itself deserves better company. Lupu made this release in 1971, in London with Lawrence Foster and the LSO — not, as the packaging elsewhere implies, part of the later Israel Philharmonic sequence with Zubin Mehta that dominates the rest of the series. It was his first concerto recording for Decca, and you can hear a young man staking a claim.

The C minor concerto has always stood in Mozart’s shadow, or rather in the shadow of one Mozart concerto specifically — K491, the Piano Concerto No. 24, also in C minor, which Beethoven reportedly heard performed and turned to a companion afterward to say something like: we shall never be able to do anything like that. Anxious, chromatic, shadowed by minor-mode grief — both works share a kinship of temperament, though Beethoven’s twenty-something self hadn’t yet earned the desolation Mozart wrote into his slow movement. What Beethoven does have, even this early, is nerve. Listen to how he treats those pianissimo timpani strokes underpinning the soloist’s first-movement cadenza — a masterstroke of orchestration, really, and one that Lupu and Foster handle with real atmosphere on this recording, the drumsticks audible but hazy, receding into a gauze of string tone rather than simply thudding along.

The slow movement is where Lupu earns his keep. Beethoven takes an extraordinary risk here, swerving into E major — about as remote a key from C minor as you can imagine, tonally speaking — for a hushed, hymn-like Largo that could easily curdle into sentimentality in lesser hands. Lupu doesn’t let it. His tone in this movement has a burnished, singing quality, weighted but never thick, the kind of sound that seems to come from some interior source rather than mere fingers on keys. Then the finale erupts back into C minor — Beethoven exploiting the enharmonic sleight-of-hand between G-sharp and A-flat to yank us out of E major’s warmth and back into turbulence — and Lupu’s rhythmic snap here is exemplary, urgent without ever sounding rushed or brittle.

If there’s a limitation, it’s the orchestra, or rather what the engineering and the collaborative chemistry allow the orchestra to do. The LSO plays cleanly, professionally, but there’s an anonymity to the accompaniment that never quite matches Lupu’s inwardness at the keyboard. This isn’t a one-sided partnership like Backhaus and Böhm, or a great meeting of minds like Curzon and Szell — it’s a very good pianist getting adequate, occasionally routine support. Mehta’s contributions elsewhere in this Eloquence reissue apparently suffer similarly, according to those who’ve heard the full set; competence without real profile.

The 32 Variations get a fine outing too — Lupu plays them as one continuous, obsessive paragraph, refusing to let the double bars break his momentum, which is exactly right for a piece that can otherwise sound like a string of unrelated fragments. There’s fire in his octaves, real color in the harmonic shifts. But as coupling material, it’s thin gruel. Beethoven’s own cadenzas for the Third exist in multiple versions; the composer’s transitional position between Mozartean clarity and something more heaven-storming is nowhere better illustrated than in this concerto, and a disc built around it might have found room for more — the Choral Fantasy, say, or even one of the shorter chamber works.

Still. Lupu’s pianism carries the day. This isn’t a Third to displace Richter’s incandescent version with Muti, or Gilels’ weightier, more granitic account — but it belongs in that second tier of genuinely distinguished recordings, and at Eloquence’s budget price, with sound that’s aged remarkably well for a 1971 tape, it’s difficult to argue against. Recommended, if not without reservations about the packaging — and someone at Decca really ought to have found this disc a better companion piece.