Radu Lupu: The Unreleased Recordings: Decca Masters and Radio Tapes 1970-2002. Radu Lupu (piano), Tel Aviv String Quartet, Sinfonieorchester des Sudwestfunks, Kazimierz Kord (conductor). Decca 467 1494, six CDs. Total Time: 389:37
DIGITAL REVIEW — Radu Lupu (1945-2022) was the most idolized Romanian pianist since the death of Dinu Lipatti (they actually shared the same teacher). He was also one of the most enigmatic pianists of his time — shunning the spotlight and hiding his personal charm and wit behind a fearsome physical image; with his black beard, he almost resembled Rasputin. His perfectionism gradually got the better of him as he aged: He eventually stopped allowing radio broadcasts of his concerts, and studio recordings became fewer and fewer in number. The shortage of Lupu recordings relative to the length of his career (he retired from performing in 2019) only added to his allure.
After Lupu’s death, though, numerous air checks from his concerts started to circulate among pianophiles on the Doremi label, which had the effect of widening the constricted range of Lupu repertoire on the market — and perhaps spurred his longtime label Decca into action. Shortly after what would have been Lupu’s 80th birthday, Decca has released a splendid-sounding, six-CD mini-box consisting of a few Lupu masters long buried in its vaults and selected radio tapes from the BBC, Dutch radio, and Germany’s SWR.
Lupu began recording for Decca in 1970 and stayed reasonably prolific in the studio throughout the decade, climaxing in a series of pioneering digital sessions in 1979 in which he recorded four of the five Beethoven concertos with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic (these were some of the earliest digital recordings ever made). His Decca catalog consisted almost entirely of works by five composers — Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann — with two outlier discs of the Grieg Piano Concerto and violin sonatas by Debussy and Franck with Kyung-Wha Chung. Yet in the early 1980s, the trail became spotty, and following a burst of sessions in Switzerland in December 1992 and January 1993, it went altogether cold.
In putting together this collection, Decca insists that it limited itself to pieces that were “not otherwise recorded commercially” by Lupu — and a check of Philip Stuart’s admirably exhaustive Decca discography confirms this. The set is divided into four parts by source, with two discs devoted to unreleased Decca masters, two discs for the BBC tapes, and one disc each for the Dutch radio and SWR tapes. The only unreleased Decca master this box omits that isn’t represented in Lupu’s catalog is a Schubert Allegretto in C Minor, D. 915, from the 1992 Swiss sessions.
The Holy Grail among the unreleased Decca masters for Lupu fans may be the pair of Mozart piano quartets, K. 478 and 493, with members of the Tel Aviv String Quartet from 1976 — performances in which Lupu’s exquisitely soft touch and serene legatos create a dialogue with the harder-edged Tel Aviv strings. The two Schubert piano sonatas, D. 840 and D. 850, extend the count of his Decca survey of the sonatas to 11. There is no reason other than Lupu’s obsessive perfectionism for these lovely, mesmerizing performances to have been exiled to the vault.
There is one puzzle: Although the Decca discography lists an unpublished Schubert sonata, D. 850, in December 1992, the box contains instead an unlisted D. 850 master from August 1995 — at the same Swiss recording locale. Are these different recordings, or is one of the two dates incorrect?
Of the radio tapes that span 32 years of Lupu’s performing life, the pieces that caught my attention the most vividly are 20th-century items he stopped playing as he increasingly concentrated on the German classics. Bartók’s Out of Doors suite from early in his career (1971) has all of the barbaric fury one would want, along with, more predictably, Lupu’s ability to make the spooky night music float.
Copland’s lay-down-the-law Piano Sonata takes on a more humanistic, introspective flavor with Lupu than with, for example, Copland advocate Leo Smit. Both of these air checks, which previously appeared in Vols. 2 and 4 of the Doremi series, have excellent sound here, with help from the superb acoustics of the Snape Maltings concert hall near Aldeburgh, England.
From a 1984 performance in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw comes another rare excursion for Lupu, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a performance of transcendental delicacy in episodes like “The Old Castle” and “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” and enough of the usual bombast elsewhere. And at the close of the final disc, we whisk ahead several years, long after Lupu stopped recording formally, to 2002 for a brief encore from Stuttgart, Debussy’s “D’un cahier d’esquisses,” played exactly in the trance-like state one might expect from him in this composer’s music. Where is the rest of the concert? If this box does well, perhaps we’ll find out someday.
