Beethoven Emperor Concerto – Radu Lupu

Some records deserve their comeback more than others. Radu Lupu’s Beethoven cycle from the 1970s, reissued now on Decca’s Eloquence line at a price that insults nothing but your closet space, belongs to that category. Mostly. The disc containing the Emperor Concerto in E-flat, op. 73, is the one that gives me pause, and it took several hearings to work out why.

Lupu was never a barnstormer. That much everyone who followed his career already knew. He came out of the Bucharest Conservatory and then Florica Musicescu’s studio, the same teacher who shaped Dinu Lipatti, and something of Lipatti’s inwardness stuck to him: a suspicion of rhetoric, a taste for the long singing line over the grand gesture. It served him beautifully in Schubert, in Brahms, in the first four Beethoven concertos here, where his unforced phrasing and his refusal to hector the listener register as wisdom rather than reticence. The Emperor, though, was written by a Beethoven in a different mood entirely. 1809, Vienna under French bombardment, the composer reportedly hiding in a cellar with pillows over his ears, and none of that anxious defiance quite drained out of the music. It wants swagger. It wants a pianist willing to throw the opening flourishes at the orchestra like a challenge, not murmur them.

Lupu murmurs them. The famous unaccompanied bursts that open the first movement, marked to erupt almost improvisatorially before the orchestra even states its theme, come out well-behaved, cleanly voiced, a little literal. No djinn let out of the bottle. Where a Serkin or an Arrau seizes that opening as pure theater, Lupu treats it as if it were Mozart, poised and decorous. Later, in the exchanges leading into the notorious quadruple octaves, that passage where soloist and orchestra trade thunderbolts before the piano goes climbing, the playing simply isn’t weighty enough. Worse, the ensemble around him can’t disguise the seams. The dotted rhythms in the strings don’t quite lock together; the chordal voicing in the winds has a sourness that catches in the ear like a burr in a wool sweater.

That’s the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, and I say this with real affection for both artists. Mehta was barely into his thirties when much of this cycle was taped, already the orchestra’s music director for life in all but name, and his conducting throughout the set has an unforced Mediterranean warmth that suits Lupu’s temperament in the earlier concertos remarkably well. But warmth isn’t precision, and the Emperor exposes ensemble untidiness that a slower, more intimate concerto forgives. Decca’s own packaging, incidentally, folds this album into a “Zubin Mehta Edition,” photo of the maestro prominently featured, Lupu’s name almost an afterthought on the back cover. Odd billing for what is, nominally, a piano concerto.

None of which erases what’s genuinely fine here. The slow movement, that hushed B-major reverie, one of Beethoven’s most sustained inventions in pure sound, finds Lupu entirely in his element: the tone rounded, unhurried, the transition into the finale (that quiet horn call, the piano’s soft testing of the rondo theme before it bursts out) beautifully judged. If the whole concerto lived at that emotional temperature, I’d have no reservations at all.

Context matters, too. This performance was taped in 1979, near the end of the cycle’s gestation: 1971 for the Third, with Lawrence Foster and the LSO standing in for Mehta, all the way to a digital First Concerto in 1980. Lupu, by then, had already won the Van Cliburn and the Leeds competitions. His instincts elsewhere in this set, the songful Second, the aristocratic Fourth, paired generously with a near-complete Prometheus ballet score on a companion disc, remain models of unforced eloquence. The Third comes backed, a little stingily, by the 32 Variations in C minor. Missing from the whole Eloquence survey are the Triple Concerto and the Choral Fantasy, which listeners wanting complete Beethoven-for-piano-and-orchestra can find bundled elsewhere on the same label: Arrau with Szeryng and Starker under Eliahu Inbal, and Brendel under Haitink for the Fantasy.

But an Emperor has to earn its nickname, and this one, however handsomely filled out with the two op. 51 rondos and the two little two-movement sonatas of op. 49, doesn’t quite swagger enough to wear the crown. At full price I’d have hesitated. At Eloquence’s give-away rate, curious collectors assembling the complete Lupu cycle should certainly not skip it. But if the Emperor alone is your quarry, Pollini with Böhm still glows with an authority this performance doesn’t reach, and Kovacevich’s live-wire account with Colin Davis remains, for my money, the budget recommendation to beat. Lupu deserved better company than the Israel Philharmonic gave him this particular afternoon.