RIP Radu Lupu & Harrison Birtwistle.

[andrewc]

Pianist Radu Lupu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ_H90IUUBA


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radu_Lupu


Composer Harrison Birtwistle "Earth Dances" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVnpktJtOms


https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/18/harrison-birtwistle-utterly-distinctive-music-of-delicate-beauty-andrew-clements


Birtwistle isn't someone whose music I'm very familiar with. I shall have to listen to a bit more.

[Ian H]

I must have been still at school when I first saw Lupu play.  He was introduced as a promising student.  I cant even remember what he played, but it was probably somewhere on the South Bank.

[Wowbagger]

Radu Lupu was very good indeed.

I went to a prom quite a few years ago - I think my son was still at school, or at least an undergraduate as he came with us - in which a new work of Birtwistle's was given its world premiere. We weren't really there for that though, as the other work was some symphony or other by this Ludwig bloke. There was lots of loud singing - quite Freudian!

I think it must have been this one, but I would have thought I would have remembered Simon Rattle & Willard White.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/eqwp6q

Edit: I'm wrong. Son Graham's pal from Uni was with us and in 1998 he was only 14. Seems coincidental that Birtwistle would have twice premiered alongside Beethoven's 9th.

2nd edit: aha! https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/evp2mb So Birtwistle's work was a UK premiere. He did well to get in with the Glorious 9th twice in 5 years!

[fimm]

Wasn't it Birtwhistle's "Panic" that  caused controversy at one Last Night? (This is the sort of thing I could google, if I could be bothered.)

Edit: one of the Guardian articles confirms.

[andrewc]

I believe so,  this piece.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdUsn3Id77s     


 

[andrewc]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/19/radu-lupu-piano-five-key-performances

[Wowbagger]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/19/radu-lupu-piano-five-key-performances

The Schubert Impromptus he played that are linked in that article are, to my mind, the "wrong impromptus". He also recorded Schubert's 4 impromptus, Op 90, and I much prefer those, not least because I play 3 of them! I think Radu Lupu might play them rather better than I do though...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzCbLCVX0gA&ab_channel=sibarit101

(It's the first of those that I have never learned).

Edit: there's a rather amusing point about the early publication of those scores when Schubert first wrote them. The G flat major one was considered to be unplayable by the vast majority of pianists because G flat major has no fewer than 6 flats in the key signature. I think that more than one publisher decided to change the key to G major, which has a solitary sharp, and therefore gives the pianist a lot more white notes to play. They reckoned, probably rightly, that they would sell more copies that way.