A gentle opening blaze: Schumann, Ravel and the heat at Beatrice Rana’s ‘Classiche Forme’

The ninth edition of Beatrice Rana’s weeklong ‘Classiche Forme’ chamber music festival in the southern Italian city of Lecce opened on a warm, golden evening, the air weighted with the hush of a sweltering day. The setting was the courtyard at the Chiostro del Rettorato at Piazza Tancredi, part of the former Carmelite convent now home to the University of Salento. The program opened with dreams – Clara Schumann’s Three Romances for violin and piano – and closed with Robert’s love song to his wife, his Piano Trio no. 2 in F major. Maurice Ravel’s exposed-nerve Sonata for Violin and Cello came in the middle – an arresting and unconventional choice that nestled between the Schumanns with a gentle jolt of Impressionist austerity.

Clara’s Romances, composed in 1853 and dedicated to Joseph Joachim, were the ideal curtain-raisers for both the evening and the festival. While Robert never played the violin, it’s tempting to imagine the couple sharing a quiet moment over the score, smiling at its beauties, and the rapt focus between pianist and violinist here suggested a similarly tender intimacy: Alexandra Conunova’s poised eloquence matched beautifully with Rana’s resplendent sound, though Conunova’s tone – likely diminished by the open-air venue and the oppressive heat from the stage lights – felt smaller than usual. Undeterred, Rana was luminous even in the simplest of arpeggios and together with Conunova’s graceful lyricism, they gently surged the passion into the final Romance, ending in a sublime glow.

The evening's Ravel centerpiece, performed by Conunova and the young American cellist Brannon Cho, strips music to its bones. Ravel demanded that his performers sync pizzicatos like clockwork and launch lines “like mechanical rabbits” – it is music as exposed mechanism, engineered with fierce clarity. The sonata is also devilishly hard: the technical difficulties, especially in the second movement, are almost incomprehensible to non-string players. Even among elite duos, it’s a high-wire act.

Conunova and Cho delivered a poised but softened interpretation – a tour de force in itself, less a high-wire act than a pastel rendering of music drafted with the exactitude of a blueprint. Their coordination was tight and to the point, and the second movement’s guitar-like pizzicatos and harmonics came off cleanly. The ferocity was dialed back in both the second and fourth movements – the interruptions were only moderately loud nor violent – and alas, in the second, the cello’s concluding glissando pizzicato chord was completely lost in the night air. Still, the smoothly virtuosic performance felt attuned to the setting: a warm, outdoor evening where understatement resonated more naturally than raw attack.

Admittedly, there was little sense of le bon goût français in terms of style and color – which might be described as a balance of light bow speed and gentle vibrato while sustaining only key harmonic points – and Conunova occasionally leaned into portamenti that, while expressive, were at odds with Ravel’s precise markings. There were flashes of absolute brilliance: after a furtive smile from Conunova toward Cho at the start of the lightning-fast second movement – a kind of “Okay, here we go, let’s hope this works” bravado – her crisp, well-shaped double-stops were breathtaking.

Rana returned to join her colleagues for Robert Schumann’s F major Piano Trio in a performance that was modest in scale but full of affection, and the final dialogue in the last movement was genuinely moving. Rana’s phrasing was exquisite throughout – elegant, expressive and full of quiet authority. Having known her solely through concerto and solo recordings, hearing Rana as a chamber musician was a revelation: deliciously intimate, deeply collaborative and simply gorgeous.