Rough-And-Tumble Night for Lupu

Lovers of the music of Franz Schubert have had a good week. First, Robert Levin and Claude Frank each offered fine performances of the Piano Sonata D. 960 at the Morgan Library & Museum. Then, on Sunday, soprano Christine Schäfer gave what has to be the recital of the year with a feverishly intense and grim "Winterreise" at the Rose Theater. On Monday, Romanian pianist Radu Lupu opened his Carnegie Hall program with the Sonata in D Major, D. 850.

Schubert died at the age of 31, but produced more than 1,000 works in a 17-year span. This sonata was written when he was 28, and represents the culmination of his middle period. It is notable especially for the composer's experiments with linear time. Schubert creates a timeless illusion by making the Con moto second movement twice as long as any of the other three.

This standout movement begins with a melody remarkably similar to a song, "Fuelle der Liebe" ("The Fullness of Love"), that Schubert penned in the same year, 1825. Developed very slowly, with a futuristic chromatic harmony — one can only imagine how the course of music would have changed had Schubert lived a longer life — this masterpiece within a masterpiece justifies what critic and composer Robert Schumann used to call Schubert's "heavenly length."

One thing to be said about Radu Lupu is that he gets on with it. Barely acknowledging the opening applause, he launched into a faster than normal Allegro vivace, which morphed into that amazing second movement virtually without pause. There were indeed no other pauses, even momentary ones, for the remainder of the piece. There was not even time to cough.

Mr. Lupu played with a gruff fluidity that took some warming of the ear to appreciate. Overall, this seemed to be a method of ensuring rhythmic continuity, but there was within its digitizing precious little delicacy. It was as if Mr. Lupu were simply bulling his way through the work with a good deal of unnecessary overtonal overlap. Almost like the drone of a sitar, the bass line vibrated continuously.

Taking the Con moto at a rapid clip minimized Schubert's temporal experimentation, but Mr. Lupu was so good at managing his phrases that I began to enjoy, albeit grudgingly, this rough-and-tumble performance. Compared to one of the great interpreters of this sonata, say, Clifford Curzon, this was rather superficial but still arresting music-making.

When Frederic Chopin composed his 24 Preludes for Piano, he had no intention of recommending that they be played in sequence, but he did organize them in a logical order by key signature. Claude Debussy did not even do that, expecting that each of his little pieces would take on a life of its own. Except for a couple of famous ones such as "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair" or "The Sunken Cathedral" that exist as encores, however, these little jewels tend to be displayed as de facto movements in a larger context. Mr. Lupu played all of Book I this night.

By some stylistic turn of 180 degrees, the wateriness of the Schubert was replaced with crystalline, lapidary Debussy. Again, it took a few minutes to appreciate Mr. Lupu's well-defined passages, which emphasized not so much the diaphanous as the melodious. What Debussy would have thought of this type of communication is difficult to know, but such clarity would have been enough to expel Mr. Lupu from music schools 50 years ago. Yet, there was something quite impressive and infectious about his enthusiasm — oddly lacking in the Schubert — when he delivered such a vibrant rendition of "The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air." After all, what's wrong with a little sharp-focus Impressionism?