As she approaches I recognize the calm and decisive step that distinguishes Beatrice Rana even on the stage as she walks towards the piano. We meet in a tavern in the Prati district, a quiet corner closed between two very lively avenues, just a week before Rana’s departure for New York. Her debut with the New York Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s first concert was acclaimed by critics, who praised her lyrical intensity and anxiety-free pianism.
Rana, 29, recently presented the Classical Forms festival in Rome, which he created six years ago in Lecce and in the Salento area: a week of chamber concerts in July in unusual and beautiful places: oil mills, farms, even fields of olive trees .
“For me it is an opportunity to give something back to my land. I grew up in a very culturally active city ”, she explains,“ with the concerts of the symphony orchestra, with pianists like Krystian Zimerman and Grigorij Sokolov invited to the chamber society and with the opera at the Greek Politeama. Today, however, the musical life is completely off and there are no opportunities for young people studying in Lecce; enthusiasts migrate to Bari to listen to symphonic music and opera “. As daring as it was, the idea of the festival was successful: “The local public came in second place, but I am happy that Classiche forme is now part of the city calendar”.
Rana grew up in Arnesano, a small town near Lecce, and at school she always had friends outside the musical environment. The family helped her not to feel different from the others: “My classmates were intrigued by my strange absences, I was already taking part in competitions when I was 5, I didn’t even touch the ground with my feet from the seat.” Growing up, she continued to live in a curious limbo between passion and profession. Her turning point came when she was seventeen: after a couple of failures at competitions, her character as a perfectionist prevailed: “I said to myself: either I do this at the level I want to do or I change jobs. Shortly before graduation, he won the international piano competition in Montréal ”. In 2013 she confirmed it with the second place in the competition created by the pianist Van Cliburn, which is held every four years in Fort Worth, Texas. Rana never stopped: concerts, debuts, an important record deal, covers, interviews.
“The competitions were fundamental: even though I come from a family of pianists, we had no contact with conductors or large orchestras. After winning in Montreal I faced Van Cliburn with great tension. It is an important competition, very exposed in the media, and I knew I had to get a placement “.
Meanwhile there was Germany, four years spent at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik in Hanover. “What happens in Germany is unparalleled, it is the result of a national passion for music that I wish there was also here. With a six-month tuition fee of 200 euros at school I was able to take lessons without time limits with my teacher, Arie Vardi. The school was open until midnight, the perfect instruments, public transport, trains, concerts, sports, all free. I also had a technician available for audio-video recordings ”.
The downside was the gray environment of a city very different from Lecce. So when the pianist Benedetto Lupo became a teacher at the specialization courses of Santa Cecilia, in Rome, Beatrice first hesitated, then she moved to the capital. “To go to the Academy in via Vittoria I took the subway to Piazza di Spagna. I found the steps of Trinità dei Monti, the sun, the palm trees. I thought: I’ll stay here ”.
Here comes the carbonara, a conspicuous departure from the pianist’s diet. “We are like athletes, the closer to the concert, the more eating becomes just the intake of the correct nutrients: your lunch, with proteins and vegetables, is already more acceptable. The day of the concert I have a late lunch, so before I play I just need a banana or a small sandwich “.
His is an atypical Salento family, without a visceral passion for cooking. Then there are Rana’s perfectionism and the thorny issue of hands. “In addition to insurance, you need a lot of precautions when cooking, ironing, with car doors, especially with very heavy suitcases. Sometimes I think of opera singers, who carry the instrument inside. I admire them very much and I am sorry that neither I nor my sister Ludovica, who is a cellist, take full advantage of my father’s experience in the theater. When I accompanied the baritone Luca Salsi in “Cortigiani vil race damn” from Rigoletto my father’s fingering tips worked so well that months later Salsi asked me to explain them to his pianist! “.
He complains about the stereotypes with which the life of concert performers is told, which convey a false idea: “Wonderful places and encounters, long dresses, luxury. It is only a small part of my life. In fact, I rarely get to visit the places where I play, I’ve been to London dozens of times and I’ve never had time to go to the British museum. Intercontinental travel is the most difficult, hours of silence cut off from family and friends for the time zone, in which I am too tired even to read. Besides the piano technique, the profession also means learning to manage those situations “.
Rana is a meticulous organizer, she has devised techniques to “get food” after concerts, when everything is closed in the cities, and has become an expert in organizing comfortable trips. Planning the calendar is a complex job. “With eighty dates a year I’m a lucky person, but for sure I can’t get up one morning and change my mind. Everything is planned years in advance and sometimes the commitments made no longer reflect what they are. Looking at the next three years I try to say no, but it is very difficult “. On the other hand, it is not difficult to know who has the last word. “I decide. Even the circle of councilors is small: the family, especially my mother, my partner Massimo Spada – I said ‘never with a pianist’ and here’s how it went! – then Benedetto Lupo, my teacher, maybe a couple of friends “.
The topics overlap as the coffee arrives: the new Beethoven sonatas to study, the mountains, recently discovered thanks to Spada, “a holiday in Val d’Aosta that brought me closer to Mahler’s music visually, suggestions that for me until now they have always been linked to the sea “. Beatrice certainly prefers live music to records: “If I’m in Rome I always go to Santa Cecilia and when traveling I try to organize at least one free evening for concerts or for the opera. I love big cities but they are tiring, especially London where everything is very far away, sometimes I have to look for a place to study before the concert on the other side of the city “.
He insists on the importance of telling the music without technicalities, so as not to frighten the public; he comforts me on the formal equality in terms of earnings between pianists and pianists but points out a different problem, further upstream: “At the first competitions we were almost only girls, but already at the time of high school the girls were less numerous and even fewer in the concert activity. The proportion is about one woman in ten men. I’d like to understand what stops those little girls ”.
We are surprised that we have hardly talked about the pandemic, which for Rana was a double shock: the cancellation of many concerts and the distance from the public was joined by his lack of empathy for streaming concerts. “Then slowing down I discovered a time for myself that I had never had. An aspect that also counts in the relationships between musicians, complex to cultivate. I just met a friend, the conductor Daniel Smith, and comparing the agendas we realized that we will only meet in Rome in December ”.