Beatrice Rana featured in New York Times’ “5 Minutes that Will Make You Love Stravinsky”

Beatrice Rana describes one of her favorite Stravinsky pieces for the New York Times (Photo credit: Simone Fowler)

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Stravinsky
The New York Times
August 4, 2021

In the past, we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion and symphonies.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love Igor Stravinsky, possibly the widest-ranging and most influential composer of the 20th century, and an inspiration for some of George Balanchine’s ballet masterpieces. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

Beatrice Rana, pianist
Stravinsky: Three Movements from Petrushka

“The piano transcription of ‘Petrushka’ represents a sort of Everest for a pianist. Not only does it require enormous challenges in terms of virtuosity, but it also demands a whole world of colorful dances and folklore from the hands of a single musician. When I started learning it, I thought the orchestral score would be my main inspiration, but one day I found an excerpt from Nureyev dancing Petrushka; never before had I understood so well the musical portrait of this puppet becoming human. These five minutes tell in the most touching way the timeless tragedy of the human spirit.”

To read the complete installment, click here.