Surely the two composers who did more than anyone to redefine what a piano could achieve were Chopin and Ravel.
Pianist Beatrice Rana, who made her Symphony Center debut on Sunday afternoon, proved persuasive in one of them.
Ravel’s “Miroirs” stands among the composer’s most mercurial piano works, its individual components more stylistically elusive and structurally unpredictable than, say, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” or “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Still, they require considerable virtuosity, control and interpretive imagination, which Rana exhibited in her Orchestra Hall recital.
The delicacy of her touch and silvery quality of her tone well suited the opening “Noctuelles” (“Night Moths”), the pianist meticulously observing the score’s indications on dynamics, phrasing and articulation. Better still, she captured the ephemeral character of this music, which repeatedly shifts direction without warning or preparation – much like its title subject.
“Oiseaux Tristes” (“Sad Birds”) is a still more evanescent work contingent on a pianist’s grasp of its idiosyncratic ebb and flow. Rana alternated exquisitely fragile textures with abrupt bursts of color, while conjuring poetic expression in the final bars.
The wash of sound and fluidity of gesture she produced in “Une Barque sur l’Ocean” (“A Boat on the Ocean”) beautifully captured the scene Ravel painted, not least in the sensuousness of Rana’s glissandi and the surging character of her phrases. And her reading of “La Vallee des Cloches” (“The Valley of the Bells”) showed her sensitivity to layers of tonal shading.
Only her account of “Alborada del Gracioso” (“The Morning Song of the Jester”) was wanting, the profundities of its lyrical moments eluding her, while her fortissimo playing lacked depth of sound.
The latter was a recurring problem in Rana’s traversal of Chopin’s Etudes, Op. 25, but not the only one. Though Rana offered a lovely tone in the first etude (A-flat Major) and hypersensitive playing in the second (F Minor), she relied far too heavily on the sustaining pedal in many of the vignettes that followed. Her reading of the sixth etude (G-sharp Minor), which pianists call a study in thirds, devolved into a blur of sound; ditto her account of the eighth (D-flat Major), her right-hand passages utterly lacking in clarity.
By the time she reached the 10th etude (B Minor), for octaves, listeners were assaulted with a tidal wave of overpedaled noise. And in the 11th etude, “Winter Wind” (A Minor), Rana showed little insight into the meaning of this music, instead plowing through it as if it were a mere technical exercise. Chopin’s etudes, of course, are much more than that.
Unfortunately, Rana followed this onslaught with Guido Agosti’s transcription of portions of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” Its thunderous opening passages again brought forth the harshness and shallowness of Rana’s fortissimo playing. She made up for it, in part, during more mysterious sections of the work, but ultimately the performance descended into more piano pounding.
Rana needs either to learn to play deeply into the keys in high-decibel, high-energy music or stay away from scores that demand a sound she cannot yet produce.
Audience ovations prompted Rana to extend her short program with two Chopin Preludes from Op. 28: No. 13 in F-sharp Major and No. 16 in B-flat Minor.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @howardreich
