Audiences can be restless, but during Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor on Wednesday evening, the only sound came from Beatrice Rana’s piano. The audience was completely gripped.
This was the 30-year-old’s debut recital at the Barbican, but no gentle curtain-raiser for her; Rana dove straight in with Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor – a bold choice, owing to its dense, chordal textures, which make it notoriously difficult to voice. In less accomplished hands, the piece can descend into little more than a bleak wall of sound. Rana was in control every step of the way. A sinister opening and tender second subject, she followed with an unrelenting crescendo, building into a climax of immense scale. Rana’s octave technique seems superhuman, as she lands on the keys with a high wrist, then takes it down in an instant to play dazzlingly clean runs across the keyboard.
Vivid imagery permeated the next few works. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s rarely-performed Cipressi was composed to evoke the swaying of cypress trees at the Villa Forti in Usigliano, Tuscany, where the composer spent many of his summers. A disturbing, sometimes heartbreaking piece, Rana skilfully brought the Tuscan hills to life, revealing glimpses of nostalgia, distant and out of reach.
La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, the first of two Debussy preludes, began almost lifelessly, as Rana developed its mysterious, nocturnal harmonies. In Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest, she conjured up a wind of unpredictable violence. Rumbling, pianissimo arpeggios quickly transformed into passages of electrifying virtuosity, requiring pinpoint accuracy and an ability to build and hold dramatic tension. Rana rounded off the first half with Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse. Full of hand crossings, extended trills and crisp dotted rhythms, its atmosphere is nevertheless one of warm sunshine. Maintaining an ideal balance of sustain pedal throughout, she captured the essence of the piece’s playful character. A soul-stirring coda became a race to the finish line, culminating in a downwards cascade to the piano’s bottom A.
And so, to the Liszt. This single-movement sonata makes demands of the pianist on every physical and emotional front. But from the first forte on the first page, Rana took charge. Where fragile, singing lines flowed one moment, a visceral mania was unleashed the next. She demonstrated a capability for octaves of Horowitzian power, yet always controlled, a sense that she could pull back and reduce to nothing whenever the score required. Only occasionally, could she have left a little more time, a little more space in the music.
Rana gave us Liszt the showman and Liszt the poet in equal measure. The stretta quasi presto hurtled along to a highly charged climax, while the Andante sostenuto coda felt beautifully resigned. This was deep Liszt, risky Liszt, menacing Liszt. Rana knew it. And the audience knew too. At the piece’s end, the hall was silent for a full 20 seconds. We had to remind ourselves to applaud.
For the encores, Scriabin’s Étude in C sharp minor was all brooding melancholy, while Debussy’s Étude pour les huit doigts was brilliant, comical, let loose with glissandi. Rana had brought us back down to earth... gently.
