vallierojas: Lucerne festival goes Lupu for Brahms

Monday, August 15, 2011

Lucerne festival goes Lupu for Brahms

Piano-guru, Radu Lupu, channelled the spirit of Brahms in his astonishing performance with Claudio Abbado's Lucerne Festival Orchestra

What a difference a day makes. After H�l�ne Grimaud and Claudio Abbado had a creative falling out before this year's Lucerne festival, Romanian piano-guru Radu Lupu stepped into Grimaud's lupine shoes to take over as the soloist in Brahms' First Piano Concerto with Abbado's Lucerne Festival Orchestra. (Mitsuko Uchida replaces Grimaud in the Schumann Concerto that Abbado and the orchestra will play in London in October, along with Bruckner's Fifth Symphony.

Paired with the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony ? more of which anon ? Lupu played the Brahms with as much musicality, but, alas, far more technical mistakes, than any performance I can remember. Of course, Brahms' piano writing ain't easy (Stephen Kovacevich revealed to me there are places in the Second Piano Concerto that everyone fakes, and the First isn't any easier), but it made for an uncomfortable listen, however gloriously the orchestra played. (Well, there was that, a mobile phone that rang twice with silence-scarring violence during the encore ? Lupu's otherwise radiant performance of Brahms's intermezzo, Op. 118 no. 2 ? and a snoring buffoon who somehow managed to sleep through the entire concerto.)

However, playing the same programme the next night, on Sunday, Lupu was a pianist transformed. Here, everything he tried came off ? technically and musically ? to make a cleaned-up revelation. He took nothing for granted in his playing on Sunday, returning the concerto to its radical, revolutionary roots.

Coincidentally, there was something additionally echt-Brahmsian about Lupu's performance in his physicality, everything from how he sits at the piano to his beard. Lupu addresses the piano keyboard just like Brahms did, or rather, just as Willy von Beckrath painted him in 1896, the year before he died (apart from the cigar). This photo shows Lupu's Brahms-like beard, and check out him playing Brahms's Op 117 no. 1 to see him in full Brahmsian flight, with spookily similar arm movements to Von Beckrath's painting. Some other pianists say they channel the ghosts of the great dead composers in their performances, but Lupu doesn't even have to try. He embodies Brahms the man and the musician every time he walks on the platform.

The Adagio from the Tenth Symphony after the interval, completed Abbado's cycle of Mahler symphonies with the Lucerne Orchestra (apart from the Eighth). Apologies for still more Abbado-Lucerne paeans of praise, but this was yet another interpretation of cathartic power and intensity. Yes, Abbado should play the rest of the symphony too, but hearing him and this orchestra build up the nine-note dissonance at the climax of the Adagio was simultaneously terrifying and seductive. Like Lupu's pianism, this was music-making that forced you to become part of Mahler's emotional world, an experience that's both life-enhancing and dangerous.

So as a YouTube treat, here are all of Abbado's Mahler symphonies so far with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, ever since the Second with which he incarnated the orchestra back in 2003. For me, there's no contest: this is the Mahler cycle of our time, and maybe, of any time. What do you think? Don't just trust YouTube either, since all of these performance are available on Blu-ray, definitely worth buying to experience in all their glory. In any case, enjoy.