Lupu's first major concerts in the United States after his Leeds Competition victory were in February 1972 with the Cleveland Orchestra, in the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Daniel Barenboim conducting at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and in October 1972 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. The performance of the Brahms with the Cleveland Orchestra and Barenboim was reviewed by Harold C. Schonberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic for "The New York Times" who had ten years prior notably lambasted the famous New York Philharmonic concert of April 6, 1962 where the same concerto was played by Glenn Gould with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Schonberg was also critical of the performance by Lupu and Barenboim, writing that not since the Bernstein-Gould performance "had there been such an interpretation" of the concerto, describing it as "willful, episodic and mannered, self-indulgent, capricious". However, he added that "yet through all the eccentricities came the feeling of two young musicians trying hard to get out of the rut and once in a while actually succeeding", but that "in future years this kind of approach may jell for them. Right now it does not come off."