Beethoven Piano Concertos – Radu Lupu

Radu Lupu never wanted to be a phenomenon, and that, oddly enough, is what makes these Beethoven recordings worth pulling back into circulation. He was — is, in memory, since he walked away from the concert stage and then from life itself a few years back — a pianist who distrusted the grand gesture, who sat low at the keyboard as if trying to disappear into it, and who somehow made that self-effacement into its own kind of eloquence.

Decca has reissued the whole cycle now on its budget Eloquence line, four discs, recorded piecemeal across the 1970s with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic doing most of the honors. The Third, taped earliest in 1971, gets Lawrence Foster and the LSO instead; nobody has ever quite explained why. The packaging tells its own small story of billing politics: Mehta’s face on the cover, “Zubin Mehta Edition” stamped across the top, as though the director were the main event and Lupu some gifted assistant. Anyone who actually listens will hear it the other way around.

Start with the Fourth Concerto. That’s where this set earns its keep. Beethoven’s boldest structural stroke — the piano opening alone, unaccompanied, before the orchestra creeps in a third away in B major as if answering from another room entirely — asks for a pianist who can make silence eloquent. Lupu’s opening phrase is hushed, unhurried, voiced with a translucency that recalls, without imitating, the give-and-take rubato of Solomon’s old album, another pianist who understood that Beethoven’s slow tempos are not empty space to be filled but rooms to be inhabited. The touch isn’t flawless. There are moments in the first movement’s wandering, key-shifting second subject where the inner voicing goes a little muddy, textures blurring under pedal, but the poetry survives the small technical untidiness. It usually does with Lupu.

The slow movement is the reason to own this disc. Orchestra barking in stern dotted unisons, piano answering in hushed, unbroken legato: it’s one of the strangest confrontations in the whole concerto literature, closer to opera than to sonata form, Orpheus taming the Furies as Liszt famously, if a little too neatly, described it. Lupu plays his lines with such patience, such refusal to hurry toward consolation, that the drama actually deepens. Mehta, for his part, sounds genuinely hushed here, genuinely listening. Elsewhere in the finale, though, as Beethoven tiptoes into the rondo theme in the “wrong” key before self-correcting, the ensemble gets a touch ragged, as though the orchestra wanted to move on before the joke had quite landed.

Elsewhere the results are less transcendent, more simply satisfying. The First Concerto, recorded in 1980, the solitary digital entry in an otherwise analog set, and you can hear the difference in the crispness of the strings, gives us a slow movement of real gravity and a finale that bubbles along without ever turning coy or cute, the danger that lesser pianists fall into in this particular jollity. The Second, generously paired on its own disc with nearly the complete Prometheus ballet music, is Beethoven still wearing Mozart’s coat, and Lupu wears it comfortably, without fussy anachronism. The Third, the odd one out geographically and chronologically, has less individual profile. Foster’s LSO accompaniment is efficient rather than characterful.

None of this is demonstrative pianism. You won’t find the seismic dynamic extremes of a Gilels, or the interpretive audacity, bordering on willfulness, of a Michelangeli, whose own Beethoven recordings, scarce as they are, turn every phrase into an event. Lupu doesn’t do events. He does something harder to describe and rarer: he gets out of the composer’s way while somehow still sounding like nobody else. Compare him with Brendel’s Philips cycle, more architecturally rigorous, or with Kempff’s, more inward and songful still, and Lupu occupies his own middle ground: warmer than Brendel, more structurally alert than late Kempff, less showy than either Ashkenazy or Barenboim in their respective Beethoven traversals.

Should you buy it? At Eloquence’s price, certainly, though newcomers wanting all five concertos on modern digital sound with disciplined orchestral playing should look toward Andsnes with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, or Paul Lewis with Järvi. But those who remember what made Lupu’s artistry so quietly addictive, or who never got the chance to hear it live — his cancellations became almost a running joke among presenters, Boston included, more than once — will want this. The playing has warts, yes. It also has soul, unforced and without vanity, which in this repertoire is worth more than a hundred immaculate run-throughs.