It seems that the "Romanian gaffe" committed by me in previous posts, which I tried to remedy in the last post, has been forgiven; however, in the course of the work done to recover, I have rediscovered and listened to a good number of Eastern European musicians whom I believe I will tell you about sooner or later upon my return to Italy.
In the meantime, having - in the post regarding Episode No. 1 of the gaffe - spoken of theBucegi bear that night falls here in Buşteni, something came back to my mind...........................!
Radu Lupu was born in 1945 in Galati, a rich, highly cultured and beautiful city of Dobrogea (a few steps from Macin, which my wife is originally from), to a Jewish family of high lineage.
He began playing the piano at age 6, debuting at age 12 with a concert of his own compositions. Subsequently, he went to study in Braşov, just steps from where I am now, at the People's School for the Arts; he completed his studies at the Bucharest Conservatory with Florica Musicescu (who was also a teacher of Dinu Lipati). In 1961, he received a scholarship from the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory and studied there with Heinrich Neuhaus, a great pianist and, after his paralysis, a teacher, , author of the famous "The Art of Piano Playing" and favorite teacher of Sviatoslav Richter .
Lupu has won numerous awards, including the Van Cliburn, Enescu, and Leeds International Piano Competitions. Regarding the Van Cliburn, Benjamin Irvy states that after choosing Lupu in 1966, the competition failed in its choice of winners, having awarded pianists who subsequently did not achieve success.
Lupu's concerts and recordings, the latter being infrequent, have always been acclaimed. He is known especially for his interpretations of the great German and Austrian composers, such as Schubert, Brahms, van Beethoven, and Mozart, as well as the Hungarian Béla Bartók. Although Lupu has performed very often with the world's major orchestras, he remains a solitary figure, living a retired life in his Lausanne; he has constantly refused to grant interviews and, moreover, speaks and moves very little, even when playing; but when he plays, with that austere and closed face, pure nectar flows from his hands.
Despite this, the critic Michel Schneider, who must do his job after all, nicknamed him "the Carpathian bear"! I must say - having rewatched a video of Lupu after the infamous scolding - that he truly resembles the bear that descends here from the Bucegi mountains (i.e., the Southern Carpathians) to Buşteni in the evening, which I watch as it raids trash cans, unperturbed by the barking of dogs trying to drive it away!
Music critics are also unsettled by the fact that Lupu plays sitting on an office chair instead of a traditional piano stool, in a manner similar to Glenn Gould, who used an old rickety chair.
His concerts at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) are famous - together with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti - featuring Schumann's Piano Concerto and Bruckner's Symphony No. 6 (2008), and van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Scriabin's Symphony No. 2 (2009).
I am posting here Lupu's Piano Concerto No. 23 K488 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sándor Végh, one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century; also born in Romania - in Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania - but in an era when the region belonged to Hungary and the Romanians had not yet succeeded in creating "Greater Romania".
I apologize if I post the three movements separately, but I have upload limits that did not allow me to upload the entire concerto, recorded live.
As with my other posts, small corrections have been made (applause/noise suppressed, equalization, etc.), in an attempt to improve your listening experience.
First Movement
Second Movement
Third Movement
Bye and see you again upon my return!
Happy holidays to everyone 😆 (except, and I don't want to repeat myself, the notable exception of the much-vilified and hated tuner/musicologist/musician/pianist/..../..../..../
- Good grief, what a struggle to list it all, it sounds like the surname of an 18th-century Spanish noble! - Paolaccio PianoExpert, who, as you all know by now, is always on holiday!🙂 ).