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He admitted to The Monitor: “I found even the most basic principles of piano technique very difficult, because it required a great deal of self-discipline, and I always felt that for years, as I dreamed of one day becoming a composer, there would be no need for that kind of perfection.”
Despite this, Mr. Lupu had previously finished fifth at the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna in 1965. Breathtaking To victory in the Cliburn finals in Fort Worth next year. “I really don’t like competition,” he told the press at the time; however, he shared the first prize at the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest in 1967 and won the 1969 Leeds International Piano Competition in England.
Fanny WatermanFounder of Leeds, recalled Mr. Lupu invites the jury to tell him which of the Beethoven concertos he will play; They refused and won with the first move of the Third. he noted Beethoven with Lawrence Foster and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970 five concertos With Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Despite such successes, it impressed listeners rather than being a standard product of the competitive circuit. “He is a little different from the winner of the regulations competition, mainly in that he is not a brilliant and flawless technician,” Raymond Ericson said. Wrote The Times of Mr. Lupu’s premiere at Carnegie Hall was in April 1967. Harold Schonberg, also in The Times, thought Lupu’s Brahms First Concerto, which he returned to the theater in 1972, allowed him to have “deliberate, episodic, and decent,” but at least “the virtue of not being stigmatized from the same old cookie cutter.”
Mr. Lupu, who retired in 2019, has made several recordings for a pianist like him; admitted to getting nervous in the presence of studio and even radio microphones. A boxed set of his solo albums from Decca consists of only 10 discs, the last of which is from the mid-1990s. Among other concertos, Mozart, Schumann and GriegMr. Lupu recorded a duet with violinists Szymon Goldberg and Kyung Wha Chungand two piano or four-handed works with Mr Barenboim and Murray Perahia.
If Mr. Lupu’s solo recordings capture just a hint of the aura he exhibits in concert, his etherealness becomes palpable in many, including one of them. Schubert’s Improvisation from 1982, which draws an impossible tension from the natural flow of its lyrics; a couple Schubert 1996 Grammy Award winning sonatas; and a late collection brahms Filled with such an understanding, such light and shadow, from the 1970s that the result is as critic Alex Ross putIt sounds “as close to musical perfection as you can ask for”.
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