Top praise for Beatrice Rana and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Review: What does the death of a dictator sound like? The Pittsburgh Symphony closed its season with a blast of Shostakovich
By Jeremy Reynolds
Post-Gazette Review
June 14, 2025

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra snatched up its last Grammy Award in 2018 for a stark, thrilling recording of the Russian composer Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.

This was an enormous coup for the orchestra, an honor more commonly bestowed on ensembles in larger cities like New York or Los Angeles or Boston.

To close out its 2024-25 season, the symphony is once again recording a symphony by Shostakovich, the composer’s 10th, which he described as “about Stalin and the Stalin years.” It premiered a few short months after the dictator’s death.

It’s heady stuff. Under the baton of Manfred Honeck, the orchestra’s music director, the ensemble gave a menacing performance of Shostakovich’s 10th, at times heavy and oppressive and at times brutal and stabbing. While the orchestra considers its recordings “live,” they are actually a composite of all three weekend performances of the work as well as a “patch session,” an opportunity to clean up any issues from musicians or audience members.

On Friday, the second movement, a biting “portrait of Stalin” according to the composer, was especially vicious. While exhilarating, the orchestra’s lack of restraint gave the movement a climactic feel, with the entire second half of the symphony feeling comparatively tame.

The concert opened with a world premiere by Russian composer Lera Auerbach titled “Frozen Dreams,” an exploration of unfamiliar sounds blended with what sounded like a Russian folk tune. While I can appreciate the idea of preparing the ear with unusual sounds to set up the work’s soundscape, I found the atmospheric opening and close overlong and tedious. Later, when the violin took off with a solo and slowly accelerated, the music took shape, with other instruments jabbing short notes in accompaniment.

Auerbach’s other work is similarly minimalistic and self-contained; hers is a defined voice. The orchestration and pitch bending gave “Frozen Dreams” a chilling feel. Tightening its more nebulous sections would have helped intensify its impact.

Finally, Italian pianist Beatrice Rana delivered a standout performance of German prodigy Felix Mendelssohn’s first piano concerto, written at the tender age of 20 for the same reason as countless other songwriters throughout history and today: to impress a girl. Rana’s playing was ferocious and fiery at times, whimsically playful at others. She pushed tempos just to the edge of “rushing,” never quite spinning out of control but constantly emphasizing huge contrasts.

It wasn’t one of the season’s most technically polished performances. I could have used shorter “staccatos” from the orchestra in the first movement and some tighter playing in the third overall. But Rana and orchestra brought the work to life with a special sort of verve, the sort of performance that lingers in the mind long after the final chord.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Mendelssohn didn’t get the girl, though he married happily six years later.

The concerto, dramatic but lighthearted at the close, proved a wonderful contrast for the weightier works on the program. While there might be a temptation to read into the performance of a work like Shostakovich’s 10th in today’s polarized climate, it’s worth remembering that orchestras typically plan their seasons well over a year in advance. Any “resonance” with daily news and headlines is generally coincidental, unless the ensemble changes its program deliberately, which does happen on rare occasions.

On the one hand, this is a missed opportunity for the ensemble to engage with topics that are more front of mind than a musical portrait of Stalin. On the other, this distance ensures that programming and performances remain independent and abstract, a space for reflection and introspection rather than any sort of proselytizing.

This isn’t to suggest that art and particularly classical music is “apolitical.” It’s not. But the fact that there isn’t a “correct” way to engage with this particular art form remains one of its core draws and a reason that orchestras remain largely unifying forces on the world stage.

Read the original article here.