Both sonatas in this mid-price reissue came from composers still only 20. I particularly enjoyed Lupu’s imaginative vitality in Schubert’s little three-movement work in A flat. His delight in the unexpected in the opening movement, his beguiling ‘orchestration’ in the Andante and his lightness of heart and finger in the finale (as again in the two Scherzos) leave you in no doubt whatsoever of the true Schubert lurking behind the classical facade.
Lupu’s reading of Brahms’s F minor Sonata is richly poetic, and always beautiful in tone. But again, as in my original review in 1984, I felt that rather than conveying the full urgency and intensity of a young man’s romantic ardour, Lupu was ‘recollecting emotion in tranquillity’. A slowish tempo for the faster flanking movements heightens this impression, especially when he is so ready to relax tension in intimate lyricism. Again I admired him more in the D minor Theme and Variations (Brahms’s keyboard version of the Andante of his First String Sextet) where, as I suggested before, he combines aristocratic poise with “miracles of separately-stranded tone colour almost more telling than the original string sonority”. First-class keyboard reproduction.'