Brahms and Ravel? Wouldn’t that be like oil and water? Brandy and vodka? Well, concert programmes are not cocktails, and musicians are more like storytellers than mixologists. Beatrice Rana brings these unlikely companions together in a new recital programme, which the audience at the LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura centre will be among the first to hear in a concert on 18th October. Later dates through the course of the season see the Italian pianist touring the programme across Europe and the US.
Though she still counts as a “young” musician in comparison with most of her audience, Rana is a seasoned performer. The daughter of two pianists, she made her debut as a soloist with orchestra at the age of nine. A string of competition successes culminated in the silver medal at the Van Cliburn Competition in 2013, and she began to make records for Warner Classics the following year. In playing Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit in the second half of her recital, she is drawing on more than 15 years’ experience with the piece, having first played it as a precociously accomplished teenager.
The shape of the new programme began with Brahms. “I have never played any of his solo piano music in concert before,” she tells me over a video call from her flat in Rome, during the midst of an apocalyptic midday storm (which later makes the front pages of international newspapers, after lightning strikes take chunks out of the Arch of Constantine). “And I thought to myself, why not start with the first sonata he wrote?”
The Sonata Op.2 counts among the very earliest of Brahms’s works to survive what was, even at that nascent stage of the composer’s career, a fiercely self-critical ear which saw countless pages of manuscript consigned to the fire. He was just 20 when he completed it in November 1852, and wrote all bar the Andante of the Op.1 Sonata after it. “This was the first piece he played for Robert Schumann,” says Rana, “and it’s dedicated to Clara Schumann. And I’ve just completed a big project with the Clara Schumann Concerto. So this idea grew out of my recent artistic life.”
Rana also has considerable accumulated history with the D minor Concerto, Op.15, which she regards as the culmination of Brahms’ early period. What the concerto and the early sonata share is an ambition and a sense of scale which irresistibly invite the description “symphonic”. “As soon as you start reading the score, you realize it’s not a sonata. I can feel the urgency in it, how he wants to use the piano as a symphonic instrument, and his desire to take the piano beyond its limits. That’s why I decided to build a programme that is symphonic and more than pianistic.”
In doing so, Rana is after all taking her cue from the Schumanns, who found the 20-year-old Brahms on their doorstep one day in September 1853, in what would prove to be one of the most consequential encounters in 19th-century music. As Robert Schumann later recalled: “Sitting at the piano he began to disclose wonderful regions to us… We were drawn into even more enchanting spheres. Besides, he is a player of genius who can make of the piano and orchestra of lamenting and loudly jubilant voices. There were sonatas, veiled symphonies rather...”
Rather than doing the obvious, and prefacing the Op.2 Sonata with some of Robert Schumann’s own music such as Papillons, Rana opens her recital with a “bouquet” of pieces by Felix Mendelssohn. Before Brahms’ arrival, after all, Mendelssohn had been the most important figure in Robert’s life (Clara always excepted) until his early death in 1847. Here, too, Rana recalls a kinship dating back to childhood.
“I’ve always loved Mendelssohn’s music,” says Rana “and I think it is still so under-rated, compared to Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Liszt. It took me a long time to decide exactly which pieces to play, because I wanted to show that he is not just a Biedermeier composer” – the bourgeois cultural sensibility of the second quarter of the 19th century. She went through all the old volumes in her family music library, and then bought more for herself. “My father loves this music. I remember him playing the Sonata Op.106 all the time. He was super happy when I shared with him my idea to play this selection. He told me I must play some preludes and fugues – because he loves counterpoint – but I’m not doing it!” Instead, Rana begins with one of the Songs Without Words Op.67, “which really sounds like Brahms. Then I came across this Scherzo, and I was amazed – it’s just a couple of pages, not even a minute long, no opus number. It’s so witty, and so alive – Mendelssohn showing us his Pierrot side.”
Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte clown of uncertain motivation, became a pivotal figure for musical innovators at the beginning of the last century. Not only for Schoenberg, in Pierrot lunaire, but also Stravinsky in his neoclassical works such as Pulcinella, as well as Leoncavallo in I pagliacci. Ravel surely also responded to an alienated, Pierrot-like spirit of mischief in the poetry of Aloysius Bertrand when he composed Gaspard de la nuit in 1908 – and most of all in its finale, evoking the malicious goblin, Scarbo: “How often have I heard his laughter buzz in the shadow of my alcove, and his fingernail grate on the silk of the curtains of my bed!”
Rana was all of 14 years old when she took up Ravel’s suite, which is still renowned as a graveyard for the technique of even the most dextrous pianists. “It was the first big piece I did,” she recalls, and sets it alongside the Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto as a work which has accompanied her ever since. “I grew up with Gaspard, but I stopped playing it when I was 20. Now that I’m coming back to it for the first time, I can see how different I am, but also how consistent I am within myself.”
Ten years ago, Rana reflects, she could not have imagined playing the Brahms Op.2 Sonata. “I simply couldn’t relate to this music. I didn’t have enough life experience to put into the piece. In Ravel, there is always a sensual aspect, but it’s never open, it’s always just a suggestion. At the same time, there’s a child-like texture and innocence and transparency that makes this music already possible to understand, in a way, as a child or as a teenager. And of course, as you get older, you find more layers.” Beyond the poetry of Bertrand, Rana points to the shadow of the macabre falling over the piece, influenced by Ravel’s love of Edgar Allan Poe. She brings up the suite’s opening movement, Ondine: “On the surface, there is just the light of the water that makes it look nice, but it's not a nice piece. Ondine is not a woman, she is a nymph without a soul who tries to steal a soul from a man – to kill him.”
The suite’s central movement evokes the swaying of a hanged man in the wind, constantly accompanied by an implacable pulse in the bass. “I used to compare Ravel’s music to a Swiss clock,” reflects Rana, “and I used to think of Debussy’s music as more flexible. And I was wrong. Debussy is also incredibly precise, in some ways even more so. Ravel is already so demanding in the technique that he demands, there is already an obstacle. We can’t play music like a metronome, but Ravel is pushing back against the Romantic tradition. Whenever there is a place that naturally invites relaxation in the score, he writes ‘Sans ralentir’ [without getting slower]. Gaspard, and especially ‘Le gibet’, is a very modern piece. It has a pulse, and that pulse is like a heartbeat. A heartbeat doesn’t vary unless there is something wrong with it!”
Ravel and Brahms both notoriously kept their feelings to themselves – or, at best, wrote them down in notes. Rana teases out further similarities. “They are both incredibly refined, but they have a dark side, which comes out in the folk music influence on them – the Basque folk tradition in Ravel, the Hungarian side to Brahms. And they never get what they desire – especially in music. It’s not like Chopin – he gets what he wants. In Brahms and Ravel, there is always a longing under the surface.”
Both composers, like Mendelssohn, were also seriously accomplished pianists, even if the demands of their own music sometimes overtaxed them. Rana values in them, and in the tradition of pianist-composers which perhaps culminates in Prokofiev, Bartók and Shostakovich, a “manuality” which celebrates virtuosity. More recently we could point to the Etudes of Ligeti as reviving this meeting of mind and fingers. Rana commissions and plays a good deal of new music for herself, especially for the chamber-music festival which she directs each summer in her home city of Lecce, in deepest Puglia.
“I think this is a problem we have now. Composers don’t have to be pianists any more. But sometimes I struggle with contemporary composers. I ask them to write for my playing, to the way I relate to the piano. I want to feel the physical limits of the piano – and sometimes for those limits to be destroyed. After all, before Ravel, no one had thought of writing a piece like Gaspard de la nuit. Then they learned that it was possible.”
“We are artisans,” continues Rana. “We use our hands. And with great composers, I become a better pianist. They push me to use my fingers, my body and my brain in a different way. When I first opened Clara Schumann’s Concerto, I found that it’s a very beautiful piece. Not a masterpiece, but I could see a huge personality at the piano. But I couldn’t work out what technique to use in order to play it. Then it became very clear to me that the music expresses how she played the piano, what she was good at, and she wanted to highlight her talents, just as Liszt and Rachmaninov did in their own way.” Any day now, she is expecting the score of a new Concertino – Omaggio a Luciano Berio – composed for her by Éric Montalbetti, with a premiere scheduled for February 2025 in Paris. So she lives in hope.
Beatrice Rana performs at LAC Lugano on 18th October.
This article was sponsored by Fondazione LuganoMusica.
