Glowing praise for Beatrice Rana's North America tour
Beatrice Rana at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts (Photo credit: Galen Higgins)
The reviews are in! Critics are raving about Beatrice Rana’s performances in Boston’s Jordan Hall and St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.
The Arts Fuse wrote:
Pianist Beatrice Rana has a particular talent for building a line in ways that are both exactingly dynamic and robustly emotional.
Rana had the audience’s rapt attention within a few measures of the Bach, and our fascination remained through Debussy and then Beethoven. Her encores were startling. By then, the audience was weak-kneed, putty in Rana’s fingers. My feeling is that we all would have sat happily through the whole recital again, right then and there.
It was no surprise that Rana’s Bach was so sensitively played. Her 2017 recording of the Goldberg Variations was praised by critics. In interviews, she has discussed her affinity and deep love for Bach. The first movement (yes, she used the pedal, but very deftly) Allemande was treated with quiet introspection, while the second movement, Courante, went by thrillingly fast. The third movement, Sarabande, was introspective once again, radiating an understated yet seductive beauty. Her gentle touch, until the Gigue’s boisterous last moment, felt just right. I imagine her performance would have held Bach’s interest.
For me, the highlight of this recital was Debussy’s Pour le Piano, a suite in three movements usually associated with Baroque dances (Prélude, Sarabande, Toccata) of two centuries before. The Prélude — with its whole-tone scales — contains glissandos that Rana played so thrillingly I had goosebumps. The Sarabande, which I have always liked (playing) on the harp, is marked “Avec un élegance grave et lente.” The piece calls for a grave and slow elegance. In Rana’s hands (and pedaling) it was rather spooky, weirdly quiet and strangely alluring, full of thrilling dynamics that shook and simmered with an otherworldly beauty (all three movements could have served as master classes in controlling dynamics). The Toccata was a study in nonchalant virtuosity. I do hope she records this suite; the audience could barely stop applauding.
After intermission, Rana took on Beethoven’s notoriously long and difficult Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Opus, 106. Nicknamed the “Hammerklavier,” it is one of Beethoven’s monumental final five sonatas. The piece’s influence was enormous, inspiring young Brahms and Mendelssohn. It was premiered by the composer and great virtuoso Liszt in 1836, and went on to profoundly influence Berlioz. Rana began her rendition with a demonic burst of energy that was then interwoven with tenderness, drama, and magic. The long third movement’s dirge-like opening was given a Chopinesque feel — it was quite moving. Mercurial mood changes characterized the last movement. Rana has a particular talent for building a line in ways that are both exactingly dynamic and robustly emotional. This was my first live “Hammerklavier.” Had I not known it from recordings, Rana’s performance alone would have made me fall in love with this piece.
The Boston Musical Intelligencer wrote:
Holding her Celebrity Series audience rapt, pianist Beatrice Rana treated Jordan Hall to singular Debussy, Bach, and Beethoven. 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.
In the seven interlinked keyboard miniatures constituting Bach’s French Suite No.2, BMV 813, employing artful pedal changes— sometimes fluttering, sometimes funneling— Rana sketched a series of highly stylized dance scenes. Set in the home key of C minor, the suite consists of an elegant Allemande in binary form, a nimble Courante, a gentle Sarabande, an Air, an elegantly wrought pair of Minuets, and a butterfly-light Gigue (jig) that was perhaps more curious than joyful.
Rana’s refined yet unpretentious approach to these dance miniatures offered a refreshing change from the many proficient takes on this work that exhibit tempo but no heartbeat, intelligence but no humor. The warmth of her tone, partnered with the elastic energy of her counterpoint, recalled the human origins of dance in continuous movement and the body. Beatrice shows how the music found in these suites can also be a colorful dance floor.
After a pause, as though appreciating a beautiful gift, Rana unwrapped Debussy’s Pour le piano. Composed in the period 1895-1901 after a hiatus writing for opera and orchestra (including the orchestral Nocturnes and Pelléas et Mélisande), Pour le piano is a treasure trove of glissandi, celestial perpetual-motion effects, and gossamer trills. In these highly experimental and individualistic tone poems, Debussy tests the boundaries of keyboard writing and of his own style: behind him are such confections as the Deux Arabesques and the Rêverie, and ahead are Images, Estampes, L’Isle Joyeux, the Préludes, and the Études.
In the Sarabande, Rana took on a more meditative and aloof aspect, seemingly lost in the composer’s luminous and misty landscapes. Debussy remarked that this section should be “rather like an old portrait in the Louvre,” a velvety nostalgia that Rana captured well. The third and last movement, a Toccata, arrived in bright energetic swirls, which through a series of insouciant turns and Scarlatti-like runs shifted into a disarmingly poignant melody.
Following a brief intermission, Rana plunged into the fortissimi of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier. Acerbic, convex, unsightly, and neurotic, this challenging and grotesque sonata — completed in 1818, when the master was stone deaf — registered as a brusque antipode to Debussy’s sweet digressions. While Rana’s delivery of the Allegro and Scherzo were powerful, in the Adagio Sostenuto she exhibited a level of restraint that I have never witnessed in this sonata, bringing out the inexorable and the terrifying via time-defying extremes of tempo and dynamics. In this section, which has been described as a “mausoleum of collective suffering,” Rana’s increasingly fine pianissimi and carefully calibrated ritardando evoked frost creeping over a windowpane. Time stood still as the anxieties and morbid fantasies of the exposition metastasized into a haunted silence, a space of negative capability sustained by Rana’s restraint and vulnerable pathos. People were seen weeping.
The finale arrived almost secretly, as a seamless continuation of the Adagio. Some members of the audience may not have realized that a transition between movements had occurred. Rana cast the exploratory opening octaves like tentative beams of light, a gradual awakening and reckoning that culminated in the fury and conceptual density of the fugue. Here Rana’s athletistry and contrapuntal intelligence both came to the battlefield, rising triumphantly to meet Beethoven’s intense technical and artistic demands.
There was an audible “wow” before the applause, which Rana rewarded with a delicate rendition of “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns/Godowksy. Coaxed back to the stage seven times, she provided two additional encores: a fleeting and witty Debussy étude, (No. 6, pour les huit doigts (eight fingers)), and a smoky gem from Scriabin’s op. 11 Preludes (No.11 in B). Overall, a sparkling set of performances by a subtle and passionate artist.
StarTribune wrote:
Beatrice Rana can dance with monsters and look like she's having a delightful time doing it.
Beatrice Rana’s Sunday afternoon recital, which closed the Schubert Club International Artist Series season. She's a marvelously expressive interpreter with a keen sense of how to get to the emotional heart of a work.
Rana's delivery is smooth as silk, even when the music calls for her to aggressively hammer out chords. And the fluidity of her playing makes her a tremendously enjoyable artist to watch, each note meticulously placed, no matter how breakneck the tempo. In short, it was a triumphant performance at St. Paul's Ordway Music Theater, one that inspired eight bows, two encores and multiple standing ovations.
Sunday's late-afternoon matinee began with J.S. Bach's French Suite No. 2. Starting with a studied Allemande, Rana showed that to be merely the setup for an explosive second movement, a Courante that was fast and passionate, sounding the product of a very busy mind, but not the least bit cluttered.
The pianist's quest for contrast came through again with an ensuing Sarabande that was the quintessence of quiet introspection and an Air that seemed like an animated exchange between her left and right hands, musical ideas echoed and debated. And Rana's ability to summon up thunder came through in both a Menuet of many moods and a rustic Gigue.
Even more satisfying was an interpretation of Claude Debussy's Pour le Piano that demonstrated a clear understanding of what can make that composer's music so magical. Rana brought to the piece an impressive blend of subtlety, intensity and a touch of playfulness.
She showed that she could make even the sparest soundscapes emotionally expressive, as evidenced by the haunting beauty of the work's slow movement. And her control was astounding on the finale, her left hand all power while her right hand danced delicately across the keys of a new Schubert Club Steinway making its maiden voyage.
But Rana remained the embodiment of gracefulness and fluidity in Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, his 29th. Even when the music was at its most thunderous and complex. She found the humor inside the Scherzo and brought a haunting, hypnotic quality to the slow movement, suffusing it with what sounded like a combination of calm acceptance and a lingering longing, its final funereal tones dissolving in a weighty quiet.
If any in the audience weren't yet convinced of Rana's technical brilliance, surely the finale of the Hammerklavier sealed the argument. Beethoven's closing three-voiced fugue could be described with the film title, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and Rana's lithe yet powerful hands were all over the keyboard, articulating ideas that escape most mere mortals.
The resulting standing ovation inspired a pair of encores, the first a sweet take on Camille Saint-Saëns' “The Swan” from “The Carnival of the Animals,” her last a hyperkinetic eight-fingered etude by Debussy that demonstrated that Rana can make exceptional music, even when taking her thumbs out of the equation.