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RECITAL REVIEW
January 24, 2006
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By Renato Rodolfo-Sioson
As with any artistic endeavor, music can be a cruel
mistress indeed. Inspiration is fickle, applause
fleeting, and the much-feted darling of this season is
all too easily forgotten by the next. Worst of all is
that long experience and hard-won maturity have very
little to do with continued success; older musicians
cannot rest on the laurels of past triumphs. For
without some kind of continually questing quality —
pursuing new modes of interpretation, seeking new
means for expression, perhaps even proposing new
insights into our common humanity — music as an
art-form quickly loses its ability to speak to an
audience.
And from the evidence of his recent concert, held by
San Francisco Performances at Herbst Theatre on
January 24, the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu appears
somehow to have lost his way. Granted, many of the
fine attributes within his inimitable type of pianism
have remained untouched by the passage of time. The
velvety richness of his sound, his acutely sensitive
style of pedalling, and his astounding dynamic control
— he must have at least 20 gradations between
mezzo-piano and pianississimo —
were all clearly present on Tuesday evening. But Lupu
has also garnered several strange habits in recent
years that ultimately marred his program of Schumann
and Schubert.
At its best, his style can project a wonderfully
dreamy affect — highly reminiscent of Alfred Cortot
— which makes Lupu an ideal interpreter for the
introspective, Eusebian half of Schumann's musical
split personality. Lupu's performance of the
Waldszenen (Forest Scenes, op. 82) was not
entirely without merit: I especially liked his easy,
fanciful approach to the opening Eintritt
(Entrance), which did much to break up the movement's
potentially monotonous, four-plus-four-bar
construction. Best of all was the pellucid delicacy of
the seventh piece, Vogel als Prophet (Prophet Bird), which Lupu transformed into a study of
muted, half-pedalled twitterings.
But twinges of doubt crept in over the course of the work's nine movements. The most glaring problem was the unyielding uniformity of Lupu's sound — pleasingly rich and full, yes, but also hopelessly unvarying. This is probably due to his peculiar, idiosyncratic stance behind the keyboard: Lupu is the only pianist I've witnessed who actually leans away from the piano, such that he is forced to stretch his arms full length in order to reach the keys. (In fact, Lupu's pose looks amusingly similar to the famous Beckerath portrait of Brahms, right down to the cut of his hair and length of his beard; only the smoldering cigar is missing.) But since Lupu can only use arm weight for his sound production — the source of all those finely graded pianissimos — the louder end of the dynamic spectrum tends to sound brusque or forced. Additionally, Lupu's insistent backward lean means that he must sacrifice clarity of articulation. Try to produce, for example, an even staccato scale as quickly and softly as possible while at arm's length. The net result is that Lupu relies on a restricted range of sounds to deliver his artistic vision. And by levelling out and taming the wild contrasts of articulation, dynamics, mood, and musical character that are the very foundation of the Waldszenen — itself not among the most inspired of Schumann's compositions, to say the least — Lupu's interpretation soon dwindled into a distasteful preciosity. Such relentlessly pretty tinklings rightfully belong in the cocktail lounge; they have no business in any reputable concert hall. But the most troubling aspect of Lupu's style by far was his loose, even sloppy treatment of rhythmic and structural issues, coupled with a wayward use of rubato. This certainly did little for Lupu's reading of the Humoreske (op. 20), which, in formal terms, presents Schumann at his loosest and sloppiest. I would argue that such a difficult, multisectioned structure requires a certain imaginative sweep and forward momentum from the pianist, even to the extent of sometimes ignoring Schumann's explicit instructions. Lupu's careful adherence to every dynamic mark, diminuendo, and ritardando (and the score is positively peppered with them) only focused on the minute details within the piece — and thus further emphasized its lack of coherence. Worse yet, Schumann's heavily nuanced score in its turn emphasized Lupu's unfortunate tendency — already noticeable in the Waldszenen — to meander aimlessly, through an overuse of rubato. There is, I find, an extremely irritating, stop-and-go manner behind much of Lupu's playing. Indeed, it is so pervasive that it can actually give the impression that he is on the verge of forgetting what comes next, or that he is trying to improvise his way into the next section. One colleague tellingly characterized this winding down/jerking forward procedure as a kind of "musical apnea." (And hearing it in this context is just as annoying as in the privacy of your own home.)
Unfortunately, Lupu was unable to offer much of interest during the second half, devoted to Schubert's G-Major Sonata (op. 78/D 894). Indeed, disappointment crowned its very opening measures. The characteristic dotted rhythms so important to the expressivity of the first movement (which evolve from suspense, to playfulness, to bold drama) received such a flabby rendition in Lupu's hands as to nullify the possibility of almost any expression at all. Nor did I appreciate his reading of the second movement; while the slowness of his tempo was excusable, Lupu's needlessly ever-present rubato was unforgivable — especially when it mangled one of Schubert's loveliest melodies. And if Lupu redeemed himself with the Allegretto finale, suddenly capturing a lighthearted playfulness and breeziness that was needed so badly elsewhere, it felt like it was too little, too late. Sadly, his encore — Schubert's Moment musical No. 2 in A-flat major (from Op. 94/D. 780) — also suffered from the tinkling keys and aimless meandering method that plagued the entire concert. I must admit that I am quite fearful for Radu Lupu. It is all too clear that he has fallen into some of the traps that can damage an older musician's reputation. I fear that he has become too enamored of his personal sound, and that it has become a hobby horse excluding of all other vehicles of expression. I fear that his insistence on that sound has deafened him to its serious limitations, and its inability to capture the rich possibilities proffered by his chosen repertoire. Above all, I fear that the positive elements of his sound might someday erode away into a grotesque caricature of their former glory. May that day never come.
(Renato Rodolfo-Sioson has a master's degree in musicology from
UC Berkeley. He also received the licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music in piano performance while
studying in India.)
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Radu Lupu
