Results tagged “Philadelphia Orchestra” from Mist Net

Saturday I emerged from my cave like a hungry bear and spent a night on the town. Philadelphia is about 30 miles east of here, and it's a fine city with lots of good stuff, including reasonably priced Italian food and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was what was on the agenda. Long-suffering readers of your poor servant's blog will perhaps remember a phase in which I developed a man-crush on Radu Lupu, a Romanian pianist who's simultaneously obscure and famous. He's won a clutch of international piano competition prizes, including the Van Cliburn, and won a Grammy here and there too. He's known for playing musically, a strange term that I can only explain by saying that with some players you may say, "Wow! What spectacular piano playing!" and with others you won't say anything at all, because the music is so beautiful that you're rendered speechless, and feel a vague urge to cry for happiness. Lupu is the second kind. He's been called "holy man" and "poet" fairly often. But many pretty knowledgeable music lovers have never heard of him, because he doesn't tour or record all that much.

I saw him at the old Academy of Music 10 or 12 years ago, doing a Beethoven piano concerto. He was scheduled to come around again this past week, doing Beethoven again, so tickets were procured well in advance. He's grayer now, but still plays the same way—he plays the music with tenderness and delicacy and depth. The second movement was, I have to admit, poetic, and everyone woke up from their trances with the third, which is a happy piece of music in which the melody tumbles over itself like a bunch of puppies running up a hall. I came away with a renewed reverence for the guy. It's somehow a tribute to the human race, that people learn to play that way. But if there was any temptation to see him as somehow more than human, some divine being come down from among the angels, there was a moment near the climactic ending where he became a human again. The piano was silent for a number of measures, and Lupu just sat quietly, waiting to play. And then at one point as the music sounded triumphantly through the gleaming concert hall, the poet and holy man slowly raised an arm and scratched his left ear. I loved him for that. And it reminded me that although people who play at his level deserve a wagonload of credit for their work and insight, if there's poetry and holiness going on, it's in the music. Anyway, here's a sample of his playing from years ago: