Beatrice Rana interviewed by The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Photo Credit: Simon Fowler

Gold Star Personal and Pianistic Brightness and Warmth

By Lee Eiseman

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

October 31, 2025

The best seats for the justly celebrated Beatrice Rana’s November 8th Celebrity Series of Boston concert, consisting of Prokofiev: selections from Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, Debussy’s Études, Book 2 , Tchaikovsky/Pletnev: selections from The Nutcracker  Suite, Op. 71a, and Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 in A Major, Op. 82, are mostly spoken for, but enough remain that it may be fruitful to click HERE.

I hope that following transcript of my very satisfying conversation with pianist Beatrice Rana conveys some portion of her personal and pianistic gold-star brightness and warmth.

Lee Eiseman: A recent Van Cliburn laureate differed with me about a pianist who did not advance to the final round. I found her work emotionally fantastic and improvisational. He agreed in part, but demurred that it lacked clear structure. Critics talk about emotion in music as well as structure. We talk about architecture as well as journeys and destinations. If you’re in the moment, can you be thinking about the architecture? And what do we mean anyway by musical architecture? There’s Bauhaus, there’s Rococo, and Classical. What does musical architecture mean beyond understanding of structure? Are you thinking about recapitulations and sonata form in the moment when you’re playing.

Beatrice Rana: Structural analysis happens in the very first moments of learning a piece. You can’t move in the building if you don’t know how it’s built, and so it is essential to know the architecture.

It’s not just something that we can just understand scientifically. Why did that composer choose the sonata form or the prelude or the nocturne or whatever? There is always a choice behind that. It’s incredibly important to understand the overall structure. And having it in your blood before you get to play on stage. The more you know, the architecture and the structure, the more really you can move in that architecture, and you can be in the moment because you are so much more aware of where you are going and how you can go there; you can even decide to change direction, and you still know what’s the arrival point.

Understanding structure is essential, but it should be lived in two different moments. The architecture is something that happens at the very beginning of learning the piece; it would be absolutely nuts to think of it in the concert hall; “Here I am, starting every recapitulation.” That could never happen. Living in the moment means it can happen every day in a different way for different audiences.

LE: Have you ever heard someone play and thought to yourself, this person doesn’t understand the structure?

BR: Well, maybe not in this very specific way.

For me, during the performance, it doesn’t matter if the structure is understood or not. The direction is what’s very important to me. It’s about if the person I’m hearing knows where to bring me at the end; the concert is not just a moment of listening, it’s about sharing one experience. For example, when I play the Goldberg variations, the structure is so clear. Even though it’s very difficult to manage because it’s such a long and huge structure, at the very end, no one really cares about how Bach variated the theme 30 times. It’s about listening to where this man is bringing me emotionally and spiritually with this piece, and how can I make a difference to people after they have heard this piece.

The most important question as a performer when I go on stage is “Where are we going today with the audience today?” even when the destination is sometimes unexpected.

LE: When you are programming an entire concert, are you thinking about the entire concert as a journey and how the pieces go together to lead us on that trip? For instance, you’re playing numbers from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet… I can see how that goes with Tchaikovsky Nutcracker. But how do those two go with Prokofiev’s thorny Sonata No. 6 and the Debussy Etudes? It looks choppy on paper. How does one piece lead to another and get to a final destination?

BR: In fact, Romeo and Juliet, doesn’t go with Nutcracker. The concert opens and closes with Prokofiev, and the choice of these two works is not casual. The focal point is the sixth Sonata, which is, of course, the first of his “War” sonatas. It is a very violent piece because it’s the only piece in which he indicated col pugno (with the fist). It’s an incredibly violent piece. It was written in 1944, at the end of the second World War, and there’s a hidden message of war.

The association with Romeo and Juliet was quite clear because there is a certain kind of violence also in that ballet music, because at the very end, it’s always about a fight. Whether about an actual war or a dispute between two families.

But the truth is that both pieces result in death of innocence, and the sixth Sonata in a bigger dimension as it relates to the war. Romeo and Juliet has a familial dimension. Of course, there is languid ballet music in Nutcracker. The main theme that I wanted to put forth is the contrast between such violence and sometimes very beautiful and very tender points; within all this violent music, there are moments of so much innocence and beauty.

And of course, we all know the Nutcracker as the typical Christmas thing that we get for children, but even in Debussy’s Etudes, one of his last compositions, we hear a sense of abstraction that gets back to childhood. I have this immense feeling about this music because there is a dimension of dream and a suspension from the gravity of the Earth. That is a perfect contrast to the frame of Prokofiev. So that’s the way that I thought through the program.

LE: So, it’s almost as if each piece is a movement of a larger entity although you start and stop from the same point to some extent.

BR: Yeah, but so do the Goldbergs.

LE: And the Ring ends up back in the water again.

BR: Honestly, I often think about how we live in a time where we have every piece of music available at anytime, anywhere, whenever we want. It’s incredible what we have. With an internet connection, we have every interpretation of every music possible. And so, the sense of the recital has changed over the years. One hundred years ago, of course, there was a necessity to listen to music in a concert hall because otherwise this wouldn’t be available. To hear a Brahms symphony would be once-in-a-lifetime experience. You go there, and then when can you hear this symphony again? Probably never. And now, we are so spoiled by listening to it and then comparing it with other interpretations. The recital is not just an occasion to listen to wonderful music, which of course has been always the case. This kind of listening experience came through different perspectives to create a journey with the audience. I very much enjoy creating recital programs, because it gives an opportunity to really put together something very special.

But I also consider the recital to be a photograph of who I am as an artist in that moment.

***

Luciano Fioramonti photo

LE: Is there any music that you don’t play?

BR: Oh, unfortunately, yes, and that’s Schubert.

LE: That’s astonishing. Why?

BR: I don’t feel ready yet, but I really hope this will change in the future.

LE: But of course, he died at 28. You don’t need to wait for gray hairs.

BR: By my age, he was already dead, right? I only do the Trout Quintet, and Four-hand Fantasy.

LE: You’re not ready for the last sonata?

BR: Exactly!

LE: Well, good. We have something to look forward to.

So, what about Italian composers? How about a program alternating Pozzoli and Busoni?

We loved playing Pozzoli’s duets with our then-young son. I don’t know whether he was a good pianist, or whether he wrote anything beyond those simple children’s pieces, but they’re so sweet. Pozzoli gave us some moments that are lightly profound.

BR: The repertoire of the piano is so huge, right? Repertoire choice is really about choosing carefully because, especially in my case, I devote one full season to one recital program, and therefore it should be something in which I can go deep and enjoy working on every day for so much time.

LE: What about Busoni?

I admire him as a figure very much…even more than as a composer. The whole figure of Busoni I find incredibly interesting, but I have never been attracted by his music. I just played his cadenza for the Mozart E Minor Concerto, which I find so beautiful, but I don’t think I’m the right pianist for it.

LE: Are there any Italian composers in your repertoire?

BR: Of course there are the earlier composers Scarlatti and Clemente, whom I like very much and I love to play. Later, there are some other composers that are very, very nice. For instance, I played a piece by Castelnuovo-Tedesco last season, and I found it so interesting. And, of course, there are a few others, but it is a real pity that these works are not comparable to the opera productions.

There is one composer that I would love to play more. I’ve always loved Dallapiccola very much, even though he wrote very little for the piano. So it’s always a bit frustrating.

LE: Speaking of Italian piano music. Any Nino Rota?

BR: Oh yeah, I love Nino Rota. And of course he’s a figure that was very important for the region where I was born. I played some preludes of his. The Nino Rota Conservatory in Monopoli, Puglia was named after him

LE: We know him primarily from his film music.

BR: Of course, everyone knows him for it. But actually, he founded the conservatory in my region, so he was also very, very important on that side.

LE: I gather, you met the Pope recently.

BR: Oh yes.

LE: What did you play for him?

BR: I played the Aria from the Goldberg. There is nothing better than that.

LE: How slowly?

BR: Not so slowly. And yeah, it was very special and also very nice. I live in Rome, and it is a matter of fact that this city has been enriched incredibly by the presence of the Vatican. But this didn’t help music so much, because music has always been seen from the church as something disturbing the spiritual. When Franz Liszt arrived at the Vatican and asked to be the Kapellmeister in the Sistine Chapel, the pope refused. So this has been always a problem.

So to see this acceptance from the Vatican for classical music has been really moving for me. It was a concept organized on Music Day, and it was my personal wish to have all piano, so I invited different pianists from different parts of the world. There was a night where there was not just classical music, but piano more general piano music, like jazz from Latin America with Gabriela Montero.

LE: Could you tell whether the Pope was moved by what he heard?

BR: He met me personally in the morning and was very nice to us. Afterwards, I have no idea because the security was quite strict. Also, it was the first time that a concert was organized in that piazza.

LE: Was it scandalous that your elbows were showing?

BR: It’s okay now.

LE: Pope Benedict was apparently a good pianist.

BR: Yeah, but secular music has not played a big role at the Vatican and maybe there’s enough wonderful religious music that it doesn’t necessarily have to.

LE: Maybe all music is religious when it’s played with emotional engagement.

BR: I think so too.

***

LE: Do you like people to write about your outfits?

BR: Honestly, it’s part of the concept. There is the musical part, the spiritual part of it, but the rest of the performance includes the outfit and how you work on stage. The hair is even part of the performance, like it or not. So I have nothing against describing it in a review.

LE: Occasionally our reviewers are faulted for mentioning attire; to my mind, if it’s meant to be interesting, there’s no reason not to discuss it. Our reviewer Veritas Gossman devoted a paragraph to what you were wearing: “Her entrance drew more than a few gasps, as she glided on stage in an iridescent black gown with an hourglass silhouette and a unique embroidered back reminiscent of a swan’s wings.” [Entire 2023 review HERE]

***

LE: Tell us about your chamber music festival.

BR: I founded Classische Forme ten years ago in my hometown of Lecce. It’s something that I enjoy very much. It runs in the third week of July. Incredibly talented, and amazing musicians come down there, every summer, and the audience is quite diverse. It started mainly with tourists, because it is a very touristic region, but now, more and more locals come as well, which makes me incredibly happy. This is something that I did especially for the community I grew up with. I intended it as a gesture of gratitude to the place where I grew up. It’s such a gorgeous place and gave me so much inspiration. It’s my way to bring international artists to such a tiny town for a week.

It’s all outdoors in a countryside cloister and really, it’s a way to bring music out of theaters, because I find that in Italy, more and more people find theaters intimidating, especially for classical music.

And they might not know what to wear or how to behave. And I said, okay, if people don’t come to theater, I will go to the people. This is quite easy in Italy. Lecce is such a Baroque city. Really, we have places with amazing architecture and wonderful acoustics.

Our cloister is amazing! Really better than the Italian opera theaters, that’s for sure. Everyone’s invited for next summer!

Read the full article here