Lucchesini, still in his early twenties, hit the headlines four years ago as winner of the 1983 Dino Ciani Contest in Milan. On first hearing him two years later in a Chopin recital record I described him as a gracious as well as brilliant musician—and that still holds good. The trouble here is that he is too gracious, or should I say too Chopinesque, for the high-powered elemental Beethoven encountered in the finale of the Moonlight and all but the slow movement of the Hammerklavier.
What I question most is his rhythmic yielding. Even in Chopin's B minor Sonata this flexibility isn't always too good for the work's architecture. In the Hammerklavier, not least its mighty first movement, it's still more undermining. Beethoven himself so precisely indicates where he wants a ritenuto. Any attempt to insert more, or elongate existing ones in pursuit of espressivo, merely makes the music soft-centred. So, also, does Lucchesini's way of shrinking from the composer's shock tactics where dynamic contrasts are concerned. Rather than carry a crescendo through to its real, biting end, so often he prefers to prepare his listeners for the sudden piano to come—as, for instance, in his anticipation of the cantabile just 27 bars before the end of the first movement's exposition. Bars 5 and 6 after the change to allegro in the finale's questing introduction bring another striking example. There's even a momentary rhythmic wilting in the Scherzo not long before the trio, more urgent in basic tempo though this movement is than the first and last. Predictably, the Adagio proves Lucchesini's happiest hunting ground, with telling una corda and tre corde tonal contrasts and a sensitive response to harmonic surprise—like the gleams of G major light in bars 14 and 15 after the opening F sharp minor shadowland. Even so, I still think the second theme (con grand' espress, tutte le corde) needs a more cutting intensity. It is only fair to add that everything that Lucchesini does throughout the work is clearly defined and richly expressive in its own romantic way. But as yet he can't compete with his many maturer rivals in the catalogue in conveying the music's explosive drive and strength.
As for the Moonlight, its opening movement is full of subtle nuances beautiful of their kind. Yet for me, cool, calm, classical continuity is even more spell-binding in this music. Stricter attention to the shorter crescendo markings just before the end of the exposition would not have come amiss in the finale, which emerges less than fully disturbed in spirit despite impressive pianism.
My feeling is that for the moment this lyrical artist, in his way a true poet, should not look to the classical past but to the mid-and-later nineteenth century when he next returns to the recording studios—where full justice is always done to his mellow tone.'