Music Reviews : Radu Lupu in Piano Recital at Chandler Pavilion

From pianists in recital, sometimes what you see is what you get. Demonstrative types often produce music as colorful as the music maker looks. Conversely, quiet and introspective pianists may achieve results as spiritual as their visual image.

With Radu Lupu, who returned to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Sunday night with a program of music by Bach, Schumann and Liszt, a certain distancing in his physical presentation is exactly mirrored in his musical one.

What you don’t see, you don’t get.

For all his superior and elegant accomplishment, the 44-year-old Romanian musician remains a pianist who does not connect with his audience--and appears to want it that way.

He seems to play for himself alone, and to very high, self-set standards. But, Sunday at least, when his latest local recital--he has been appearing here for the better part of two decades--drew a large and vociferously appreciative audience to the Pavilion, he communicated not a lot more than tremendous self-absorption.

For many listeners, that is enough: They hear the music, and appreciate being allowed to watch the performer commune with himself. For others, those who see musical performance as a two-way thoroughfare, it is much too little.

At the end of the evening, after a very impressive run-through of Liszt’s B-minor Sonata, Lupu did mesmerize the serious observer with an exquisite encore: the slow movement from Schubert’s Sonata in A, Opus 120. This exquisite performance, in moments so inward-looking it almost became inaudible, reinstated one’s admiration for Lupu’s pianism.

Earlier, that admiration flagged.

Bach’s “Italian” Concerto became an occasion of rectitude, not joy, a thinking person’s walk through a pleasant place. Beauties of linearity raised the middle movement above mere pedestrianism--Lupu conjured up a thread of thought which extended from beginning to end in the familiar piece--but the outer movements had a stubborn objectivity that nearly denied their true feelings.

Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” a work so personal it sometimes seems to change its facets from day to day, showed Lupu in his most inward mode: the poet deep in meditation.

This approach, if bolstered by a huge palette of pianistic touches and a wide spectrum of soft-playing, can work. But Lupu’s command of dynamics is endangered by a lack of variety and by an energy which seems to evaporate below mezzo-piano. No wonder a lot of coughers took this opportunity to compete with the sounds on the Pavilion stage.

Finally, the Liszt Sonata, battleground of warring emotions and the scene of uninhibited passions, turned, in Lupu’s hands, into a survey of contrasts accomplished from a distance.

At no point did the pianist seem to be participating in the musical scenario; he appeared to play the piece without bringing himself into it. This produced an unexpected dichotomy: He played it in a shorter time than some do, yet made it seem longer. Without feelings--true and shared and expressed--the world can seem gray.