Before Ciara, there was Beatrice. A select number of the audience at Wigmore Hall on Friday night knew the storm that was about to hit them; many more didn't. When I read Beatrice Rana's words in her Bachtrack interview with Thomas May, “Whenever we go onstage, we have to give everything to the audience,” I dismissed them as standard artist platitude. Having now seen her in recital, I realise how wrong that was: they’re just a description of the way she works.
The first music of the evening, J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto, showed just how different Rana’s approach is from the rest of the pack of young pianists. Her touch is weighty: the notes come through with a full and rounded timbre. But with the weightiness of touch comes almost uncanny accuracy, so the melody in a passage of notes is clear as well as rich: there’s no question of the waters being muddied. And that applies to both high and low registers, so that the simultaneous high and low melodies of Bach’s counterpoint were as clear as each other. Rana plays the Bach with relatively little pedal and none too extreme dynamics: in a way, it’s quite a harpsichord-like style and it makes for a thrilling performance. The first movement was over far too soon. In the second movement, there was roundedness of timbre and there was carefully thought through long-term phrasing that made for delicious cantabile while making your ear want to find out what was coming next. The third movement was joyous in its sure-footed acceleration.
Robert Schumann wrote his Piano Sonata no. 3 in F minor as a five movement piece: his publisher persuaded him to drop two of them, publishing it under the title of “Concerto Without Orchestra”, making it a neat counterpart to the Bach. It’s not an unfair description: with the tempestuous way in which Rana set about the first movement, I had a surprisingly vivid sense of listening to a Rachmaninov concerto. Rana was masterful at thickening the texture when wanted, but elsewhere showing delicacy, with a surprisingly clean touch for such a full-blooded performer. The first sign of muddiness came in the third movement, which Rana took at a fair clip. This isn’t a work performed all that often and I’m not sure that she persuaded me of its merits, but I was certainly enthralled by her playing style.