In a 1920s-style gown encrusted with scales, the dazzling Italian pianist Beatrice Rana strode majestically onto the Jordan Hall stage Saturday night, and after a quick bow to her Celebrity Series audience, launched immediately into four selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. She wasted nary a second in beginning massively with her mightily left hand in No. 6 , “The Capulets and the Montagues.” It was the most stunning concert opening that I can remember. The fireworks kept coming, leaving the listener in suspenseful eagerness to hear more. The other well-chosen selections were No. 7, “Friar Laurence,” No. 4, “Young Juliet,” and No. 8, “Mercutio.” This opener is the kind of big, show-off virtuoso piece Rana can toss off with powerful ease. Prokofiev transcribed these “character pieces” for himself to promote the ballet; interestingly, he never performed more than three movements in concert. Throughout these numbers, and indeed, the entire recital, Rana’s work encompassed fearless technique, symphonic power, unusually crisp articulation, a board pallet, and unabashed musicality

Debussy Etudes Book 2 are, unlike most of Debussy’s solo piano works, rare visitors to the concert stage. Building on Chopin’s Études and Liszt’s Transcendental Études, the set addresses various aspects of pianistic technique, from intervals(thirds, fourths, sixths, octaves) and digital mechanisms in the first book, to explorations of new sonorities.  Debussy explained these pieces well: “I must confess that I am glad to have successfully completed a work which, I may say without vanity, will occupy a special place of its own.  Apart from the question of technique, these etudes will be a useful warning not to take up the musical profession unless one has remarkable hands.”  The short selections proved technically daunting even for Debussy, who described them as “music that soars to the summit of execution…and requires you to occasionally catch your breath…as after climbing a mountain.” 

Susan Halpern’s handout essay pithily explains, “Each is a musical tone poem testing a new kind of pianism based on fingertip sensitivity and finally filtered playing.  Each presents a challenge in sonority and texture in a novel way that digital dexterity alone cannot accommodate.”  Well, Rana certainly had what it takes to spin each of the six etudes into pianistic gold.  She was, in everything this recital, absolutely dazzling, a marvel.

After intermission Rana continued with the March, the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and the luscious Intermezzo from Act One of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet in arrangements by Mikhail Pletnev (B. 1957), a Russian pianist, composer, and conductor. He performed several selections from his piano arrangement at the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition, at which he won Gold.  Rana utterly bewitched us with her subtlety and complications of voicing and coloration here.  My pianist seat mate shrugged his shoulders, “Who needs an orchestra?” I could have heard it twice.

Rana ended her formidable concert with Prokofiev’s Sonata No.6 in A Major, Op.82. His “War Sonatas” (numbers 6, 7, and 8) are characterized by deeply contrasting moods, from aggressive and dissonant to deeply melancholic, then finally triumphant. Rana played this sonata beguilingly, embracing multitudes of colors, moods, sounds, and textures, and yes, notes.  It was simply thrilling to hear this difficult piece, played so bravely and poetically, yet with energy to spare.  

Rana encored with Scriabin’s Étude Op. 2, No. 1 in C-sharp minor and  Debussy’s Étude 6 Pour les huit doigts.

Susan Miron is a book critic, essayist, and harpist. She writes about classical music and books for The Arts Fuse. Her last two CDs featured her transcriptions of keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti.

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Two days after the concert, my colleague Victor Khatutsky is still pondering.

The sonata was superb, powerful and suitably frantic. And yet, as I look back at the whole program, I still can’t make sense of it. Yes Rana started with an extra-pugnacious rendition of the “Montagues and Capulets” which came across as a fair warning about the coming violence of the sonata, but the rest of the Romeo and Juliet pieces led nowhere — and I feel for listeners who are not familiar with these tunes; they must have been confused by a mismatch between the order of pieces played versus program listing. 

And then three Nutcracker selections seemed like little more than a  warm up to the sonata. While a nice showcase of Rana’s art and of Pletnev’s, they felt so out of place that I could only think about how many pianists must be sick and tired of these melodies in their Christmas gigs, and here you have someone who can surely afford skipping them. In her charming interview HERE she explained:

FLE: When you are programming an entire concert, are you thinking about the entire concert as a journey and how the pieces go together to lead us on that trip? For instance, you’re playing numbers from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet… I can see how that goes with Tchaikovsky Nutcracker. But how do those two go with Prokofiev’s thorny Sonata No. 6 and the Debussy Etudes? It looks choppy on paper. How does one piece lead to another and get to a final destination?

BR: In fact, Romeo and Juliet, doesn’t go with Nutcracker. The concert opens and closes with Prokofiev, and the choice of these two works is not casual. The focal point is the sixth Sonata, which is, of course, the first of his “War” sonatas. It is a very violent piece because it’s the only piece in which he indicated col pugno (with the fist). It’s an incredibly violent piece. It was written in 1944, at the end of the Second World War, and there’s a hidden message of war.

The association with Romeo and Juliet was quite clear because there is a certain kind of violence also in that ballet music, because at the very end, it’s always about a fight. Whether about an actual war or a dispute between two families.

But the truth is that both pieces result in death of innocence, and the sixth Sonata in a bigger dimension as it relates to the war. Romeo and Juliet has a familial dimension. Of course, there is languid ballet music in Nutcracker. The main theme that I wanted to put forth is the contrast between such violence and sometimes very beautiful and very tender points; within all this violent music, there are moments of so much innocence and beauty.

And of course, we all know the Nutcracker as the typical Christmas thing that we get for children, but even in Debussy’s Etudes, one of his last compositions, we hear a sense of abstraction that gets back to childhood. I have this immense feeling about this music because there is a dimension of dream and a suspension from the gravity of the Earth. That is a perfect contrast to the frame of Prokofiev. So that’s the way that I thought through the program.