“I discovered even probably the most elementary rudiments of piano approach very troublesome,” he confessed to The Monitor, “as a result of this wanted nice self-discipline, and as for years I had imagined that I might someday turn into a composer, I had at all times felt that this form of perfection wasn’t going to be wanted.”
Even so, Mr. Lupu positioned fifth on the Worldwide Beethoven Piano Competitors in Vienna in 1965 earlier than sweeping to victory on the Cliburn finals in Fort Definitely worth the subsequent yr. “I actually don’t like competitors in any respect,” he instructed the press then; he nonetheless shared first prize on the George Enescu Worldwide Competitors in Bucharest in 1967 and triumphed on the Leeds Worldwide Piano Competitors in England in 1969.
Fanny Waterman, the founding father of the Leeds, recalled Mr. Lupu inviting the jury to inform him which of the Beethoven concertos to play; they declined, and he gained with the primary motion of the Third. He recorded that Beethoven with Lawrence Foster and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970 — a prelude to his later full survey of the 5 concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic.
Regardless of such successes, he already struck listeners as something however a standard-issue product of the competitors circuit. “He’s considerably totally different from the regulation contest winner, in that he’s not primarily a superb and impeccable technician,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The Instances of Mr. Lupu’s Carnegie Corridor debut in April 1967. Harold Schonberg, additionally in The Instances, thought the Brahms First Concerto, with which Mr. Lupu returned to the corridor in 1972, “willful, episodic and mannered,” however allowed that it at the least had “the advantage of not being stamped from the identical previous cookie cutter.”
Mr. Lupu, who retired in 2019, made few recordings for a pianist of his stature; he admitted to tensing up within the presence of studio and even radio microphones. A boxed set of his solo releases on Decca runs to a mere 10 discs, the final from the mid-Nineties. In addition to additional concertos, together with Mozart, Schumann and Grieg, Mr. Lupu recorded duets with the violinists Szymon Goldberg and Kyung Wha Chung, and two-piano or four-hand works with Mr. Barenboim and Murray Perahia.
If Mr. Lupu’s solo information seize solely a touch of the aura he exhibited in live performance, his ethereality is made near tangible on a number of of them, together with one in every of Schubert’s Impromptus from 1982 that attracts not possible pressure from the pure circulate of its singing strains; a pair of Schubert sonatas that gained a Grammy Award in 1996; and a group of late Brahms from the Seventies that’s suffused with such understanding, such mild and shade, that the consequence, because the critic Alex Ross put it, comes “as near musical perfection as you may ask.”
