A Romanian pianist of understated allure
Celebrated as one of finest of his generation
Radu Lupu, a Romanian pianist venerated for his understated yet enrapturing interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, died April 17 at his home in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was 76.
His manager, Jenny Vogel, confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Among classical music critics and devotees, and among the musicians with whom he performed over more than half a century, Lupu was celebrated as one of the finest concert pianists of his generation. Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker magazine, described Lupu in a tribute after his death as the “arch-magus of the piano,” “the supreme living practitioner of his instrument, a musician and artist of the highest order.”
Yet Lupu, by his preference and design, was not widely known beyond the audiences that convened in concert halls to take in what by all accounts were his sublimely sensitive performances. He made few recordings and granted even fewer interviews. In his reserve, he left some observers with the incorrect impression that he was a recluse. A writer for the British magazine the Spectator once dubbed him the “J.D. Salinger of pianists.”
Before his retirement in 2019, Lupu gave hundreds of concerts around the world. One of his trademarks as a performer was immediately obvious to any audience: Lupu did not sit on a piano bench, preferring instead a humble office chair.
“He trudges onstage, sits down at the piano like a court stenographer at a tedious trial, and proceeds dispassionately to do his job,” music critic John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times in 1991.
While other pianists swayed and tossed their heads, Lupu sat in near stillness, except for the measured movement of his fingers. Stripped of any unnecessary flourish, his performances, both as a soloist and with leading international orchestras, were marked by their musical purity.
Although he ventured into the works of Debussy, Bartok and Janacek, all of whom lived into the 1900s, Lupu was best known for his mastery of the Austrian and German composers of the late18th and 19th centuries. But if his repertoire was limited, it contained infinite expressive range.
“Radu Lupu is a strange, wizardly presence at the piano,” Ross wrote in the Times in 1994, describing a Lupu recital at Carnegie Hall as having had “the atmosphere of a seance.”
“He indulged, as always, in eccentricities,” Ross continued, “but his lustrous tone and easeful grasp of the longer musical line mesmerized the audience. The final movement of Schumann’s Fantasy in C turned into never-ending waves of lyric warmth, and the encore of Brahms’ Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) was too beautiful for words. Ghosts of the Romantics hovered behind him.”
It was often observed that Lupu seemed to pay little attention to the audience, which he acknowledged with only the most subtle bow.
“I’m playing for the audience, of course,” Lupu clarified in a rare interview, with the Orange County Register in 1994.
“The audience element is the most important element in the concert. But it is also true that if I can make music for myself, even while practising,
THE AUDIENCE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN THE CONCERT.
and be moved by it, then that will project to the audience.”
“It may seem I am playing for myself, but it’s not quite like that,” he concluded. “Why should I make a big show of the whole thing?”
Lupu was born Nov. 30, 1945, in Galati, a Romanian port city on the Danube River. His father was a lawyer, his mother a French teacher. Lupu was six when he began piano lessons and 12 when he gave his first recital, a performance of his own compositions.
In the 1960s, he received a scholarship to study at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. A string of triumphs at major international competitions helped bring him to worldwide renown.
Lupu recorded works by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, among others, for the Decca label. He received a 1995 Grammy Award for a recording of Schubert piano sonatas. With the American pianist Murray Perahia, he received a 1986 Gramophone award for an album of four-hand works by Mozart and Schubert.