Classical music lost three greats

Within 48 hours in the middle of April, the classical music world suffered the loss of the British composer Harrison Birtwistle, 87, the American pianist Nicholas Angelich, 51, and the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, 76.

While they lived, Birtwistle and Lupu enjoyed the greatest acclaim. In terms of posthumous reaction, however, Lupu’s death sparked the most effusive commentary.

This disparity should not be taken as a judgment on the lives or the accomplishments of these men. It’s as musicians that they entered the public consciousness, and it’s as musicians that they should be evaluated.

Birtwistle lived to see (and, one presumes, to hear) the latest recording of his works, Harrison Birtwistle: Chamber Works by the Nash Ensemble. Released in January, it surrounds the 2018 revision of his captivating 1981 oboe-and-percussion piece Pulse Sampler with compositions of more recent vintage.

One of these, the 20-minute 2018 Duet for Eight Strings, was, in fact, composed for the Nash Ensemble’s Lawrence Power (viola) and Adrian Brendel (cello) and has never been recorded before. Like the rest of the album, it proceeds in jagged lines suggestive more of rugged peaks and the dread that accompanies such terrain than of valleys and luxuriant foliage.

Nicholas Angelich released his final album, Prokofiev, at the tail end of 2020. If at the time of the recording he was suffering any effects associated with the chronic lung disease that took his life, they do not show.

His playing on the 20 short pieces that comprise the Visions Fugitives in particular evinces the sensitivity and sureness of touch that made him an in-demand concert pianist. Also, he knew how to structure a program. The five excerpts from 10 Pieces from Romeo and Juliet would provide a fitting climax to any Prokofiev evening.

Which leaves Radu Lupu. The near opposite of his partial contemporary Glenn Gould, Lupu avoided Bach, gave few interviews, and felt more comfortable on stage than in the studio. While Gould played with a crystalline, harpsichord-like precision, Lupu played with a dreamlike fluidity.

It was sometimes said that for a pianist of his stature, Lupu recorded little, but his now out-of-print 2015 Complete Recordings box contains 28 discs.

Over a third of those are given over to Schubert. But it’s in his performances of Beethoven (six discs) and Mozart (seven) that what made him unique comes most obviously to the fore: a sound so light that it’s hard to believe his fingers were touching the keys.