FOUR HANDS.(pianists Radu Lupu, Piotr Anderszewski, Daniel Beliavsky, Soheil Nasseri)

When Beethoven played the solo part in the premiere of his Third Piano Concerto, in 1803, he introduced a bewitching effect that lingered in the memory of his pupil Carl Czerny. The Largo movement begins with a luminous theme in the key of E. Beethoven applied the sustaining pedal throughout, so that the music became a haze of resonating tones--a "holy, distant, and celestial Harmony," Czerny said. According to the musicologist Leon Plantinga, Beethoven composed the Third Concerto just after he wrote his "Heiligenstadt Testament," in which he confessed that he would rather retire from society than publicly admit his deafness. There were many moments during Radu Lupu's recent traversal of the five Beethoven piano concertos, with the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, when that withdrawn, wounded figure came to life. In the Largo, you could almost see Beethoven walking away from his stormy C-minor world--or, if you prefer, walking from his world toward ours.

Lupu, a gentle genius of the piano, was born in Romania in 1945. With his scraggly beard, shy manner, and piercing eyes, he looks less like a jet-set virtuoso than an unsung radical poet, the kind you would expect to find huddled over gnomic manuscripts in the corner of an obscure cafe. In his youth, he played as loud and fast as anyone; he won the Van Cliburn Competition in 1966 with a thunderous performance of the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, evidence of which exists on a VAI recording. In the following years, Lupu disavowed showpieces and devoted himself to the high Austro-German repertory, from Mozart to Brahms. In 1970, he made a recording of Brahms's Intermezzos Opus 117 that is in my personal pantheon of the most beautiful piano records ever made. At a Carnegie recital in 1996, Lupu offered as his last encore the slow movement of Schubert's "Little" A-Major Sonata, and it wasn't so much a performance as a glimpse of a perfect world. No pianist gets a lovelier tone out of the instrument. How he does it is a bit of a mystery: the piano is, after all, an impersonal machine of levers and hammers. But an A above middle C sounds different under Lupu's finger. It glows from within.

It was strange, at first, to see this most confiding of pianists holding forth in front of the august Cleveland Orchestra. Yet the intimacy remained. I've rarely witnessed an orchestra and a soloist listening to each other so intently: this was a conversational give-and-take, not a tug-of-war between pre-set tempos. Franz Welser-Most, the Cleveland's conductor, often kept the dynamics muted to chamber-music levels, so that Lupu never had to fight to be heard. In a classic Cleveland sound-mirage, string pizzicatos and soft woodwind tones seemed to emanate from the piano.

The Beethoven concertos are complex, multitiered constructions, in which the piano and the orchestra often head toward the same destination along separate paths: sonata and symphony are superimposed. Although Lupu was sometimes in danger of floating away into his own private pianosphere, he periodically called upon his old competition-winner style to produce a burly, quasi-orchestral sound. The transition from the slow movement of the "Emperor" Concerto to the finale was as electric as I've ever heard it: a meditative murmur of pedalled tones--"holy, distant, and celestial" again--gave way to a blunt oration of accented chords. The two sides of Beethoven's personality achieved perfect balance: as if with a gunshot, the poet became a hero.

If Lupu resembles a venerable underground artist, Piotr Anderszewski, a Polish-Hungarian pianist who has risen to prominence in the past few years, looks like a hip young thing in an Antonioni movie. At his recent recital at Zankel Hall, Anderszewski walked onstage wearing Beatles bangs, a loose black jacket, and leather pants. He is thirty-five, and he's a serious, searching musician. If Lupu saunters through the music as if on a forest walk, Anderszewski whips around every corner like a spy. Balancing out his edgy flair is a gift for pure cantabile ...