Beethoven Piano Concerto No 2 by Lupu

Radu Lupu never wanted to be famous, and there’s a lesson in that reluctance worth pondering as Eloquence sends his 1970s Beethoven cycle back into circulation, this time bundled — a little cheekily — under Zubin Mehta’s name rather than his own.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major is early Beethoven trying not to sound like Mozart and mostly succeeding, though the seams show if you listen for them — that finale still has one foot in the drawing room. Lupu, who by the time of this taping had already won Leeds and the Van Cliburn and was busy disappointing anyone who wanted him to behave like a competition animal, plays it as chamber music that got lucky enough to find an orchestra. No podium-thumping. No look-at-me virtuosity in a work that, frankly, doesn’t ask for much. He gives you instead that inward, slightly melancholic tone color he never really shed.

The slow movement is where this disc earns its keep. Lupu drops into a kind of hush that few pianists manage without sounding merely careful. There’s rubato, but it never announces itself; the phrases just breathe, unevenly, the way real breathing is uneven. I’ve heard this Adagio played more beautifully — Gilels with Szell has a burnished glow Lupu doesn’t attempt — but rarely more truthfully. The first-movement cadenza, oddly digressive as it is (Beethoven’s, not Lupu’s invention, though the pianist leans into its wandering harmonic logic rather than smoothing it out), comes off less as showpiece than as private reverie that happened to wander into public.

Mehta is the problem, mildly. He conducts the tuttis with more weight than B-flat major Beethoven wants — there’s a four-square heaviness to the string entries that belongs more properly to Brahms. Where he loosens his grip and simply accompanies, things go better. The Israel Philharmonic of this vintage was not, let’s be honest, a virtuoso band on the order of the Concertgebouw or the Chicago Symphony under Solti — you can hear rough edges in ensemble, occasional intonation wobbles in the winds — but there’s an unpretentious, sunlit quality to their playing that suits this music better than more polished orchestras sometimes manage.

The real find on this disc isn’t the concerto at all. It’s the generous selection from The Creatures of Prometheus, Beethoven’s 1801 ballet score for Salvatore Viganò, a work that gets performed about as often as his one surviving string quintet — which is to say almost never, outside of the finale theme that everyone knows without knowing they know it, because Beethoven recycled it for the Eroica Symphony’s finale and again in the op. 35 Variations. Hearing the tune in its original context, scored with an almost balletic lightness, is genuinely disorienting — like meeting a familiar face in unfamiliar clothes.

There’s a passage — a solo harp trading phrases with the woodwinds, one at a time, courtly and a little flirtatious — that stopped me cold the first time through. I’d never encountered it. It has nothing of the granite-jawed Beethoven of legend; it’s Beethoven the theater composer, writing for dancers’ feet and an audience that wanted charm, not thunderbolts. The Israel Philharmonic’s soloists rise to it beautifully — the harpist in particular deserves a bow — and even where ensemble discipline slackens elsewhere in the score, there’s an evident pleasure in the playing, an orchestra clearly enjoying music it doesn’t get to touch very often.

The recorded sound carries its age plainly: some tape hiss, a persistent rustle of audience-adjacent noise that suggests the sessions weren’t exactly hermetically sealed, though the balance is warm and the piano tone is caught with real bloom. Not audiophile perfection. Perfectly listenable all the same.

Does this displace Brendel-Haitink, or Ashkenazy-Solti, or for that matter the classic Gilels-Szell? No. Lupu never quite convinces as Beethoven’s designated interpreter the way he does with Schubert or Brahms. But nobody buying this disc for the concerto alone is getting cheated, and anyone curious about Beethoven before he became Beethoven-with-a-capital-B will find the Prometheus excerpts worth the modest asking price on their own. A minor discovery wrapped around a very good, if not top-drawer, interpretation. Worth the detour.