Betrice Rana

For her second Warner Classics release, young Italian pianist Beatrice Rana turns to a pinnacle of the solo keyboard repertoire and a composer she has described as "my first love": Johann Sebastian Bach. Her interpretation of his epic Goldberg Variations bears out Le Monde's judgement that "Beatrice Rana certainly has nothing left to prove when it comes to technique, but what makes an impression are her calm maturity and her sense of architecture," and Gramophone's that she is "a fully developed artist of a stature that belies her tender years." Bach was the composer who most obsessed Beatrice Rana as a child, and in a recent interview with Pianist magazine, she confessed that it would be his music, and above all the Goldberg Variations, that she would choose if she had to devote her life to a single composer.

Beatrice Rana, partnered by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performs the piano concertos of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck-Schumann. She complements them with Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of Robert’s song ‘Widmung’, an exuberant dedication of love, composed in the year of Robert and Clara’s marriage. The previous year (1839), Robert had written to Clara: “You complete me as a composer, as I do you. Every thought of yours comes from mysoul, just as I have to thank you for all my music.”

Chopin is reserved, visionary and mysterious," says Beatrice Rana. "There are many layers to his music. It's pleasing to the ear and sincere in it's communication, but the deeper you go, the more you find…" For this album, Rana pairs Chopin's 12 op 25 études with his four scherzi, focusing on two musical genres that the composer, combining intellect and imagination, transformed into something new. "It was Chopin who invented the 'concert study'," explains Rana. "To me, the études seem implicitly connected, joined by a single line of expression, as if they are taking you on a journey.

Beatrice Rana combines Clara Wieck-Schumann and Robert Schumann's piano concertos with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin In an interview with the New York Times, Rana, who called the piano concerto by Clara Wieck "a genius work in many ways," said: "I think that it's very, very underestimated - the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music. It's fascinating to see that she conceived of this music free from any limitations; that as a teenager she composed an uninterrupted concerto with no breaks between the movements.

Beatrice Rana, in the words of the New York Times, is a pianist who "has ferocious technique but is distinguished by her musical intelligence." Here she plays virtuosic, poetic works that evoke the creative ferment of Paris in the transitional early years of the 20th century: piano transcriptions of Stravinsky's iridescent ballet scores The Firebird and Petrushka, and Ravel's Miroirs and La Valse.

Beatrice Rana, characterised by Gramophone as a pianist of “fire and poetry, imagination and originality, temperament and charm, all on top of fearless technical address”, brings together two monumental sonatas: Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Piano Sonata (No. 29) and Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭minor, Op. 35, famous for its third movement, the Funeral March.

Beatrice Rana, characterised by Gramophone as a pianist of “fire and poetry, imagination and originality, temperament and charm, all on top of fearless technical address”, brings together two monumental sonatas: Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Piano Sonata (No. 29) and Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭minor, Op. 35, famous for its third movement, the Funeral March.

Korean-born but a political exile in Germany for the last 25 years of his life, Isang Yun (1917-1995) managed to create a workable synthesis between western and eastern traditions, which fused a musical language based upon the total serialism of the post-war avant garde with elements drawn from both Korean and Chinese traditional styles. The three pieces here, all composed in the 1980s, show just how expressively effective that synthesis could be. In the First Chamber Symphony, it allows Yun to create a richly cushioned sound-world, full of shimmering textures, hazy microtones and supple, swooping gestures, while the rich string layering and urgent melodic writing of Tapis and the evocations of the sound of the Chinese harp in Gong-Hu, for solo harp and string orchestra, create music that is instantly attractive, even if the details of its inner workings are not always obvious.