INTERVIEW
Has any other concert pianist begun their Beethoven journey with the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata? This most mysterious, daunting and magnificent of piano works, a kind of Matterhorn amid the composer’s pianistic Alpine range, is Beatrice Rana’s first climb through the territory in the recording studio. On the one hand, it might appear counterintuitive. On the other hand, there’s nothing like starting right at the top.
Maybe it is emblematic of the way the Covid pandemic turned everyone and everything inside out. ‘I’ve been playing the piano for my whole life,’ the 30-year-old Italian pianist remarks, talking to me on a video call from her flat in Rome. ‘I started giving concerts very early. I didn’t know what it would mean to stay at home without concerts and without a schedule to respect, so at first the lockdown was quite a shock. But it was one of the biggest gifts that I could have musically, because I had time to find that relationship with the piano and with music that I had perhaps lost because I was always practising for a performance. Just to have time to ask myself what I really wanted to play, not necessarily on stage, was wonderful, because I explored repertoire that was not on my list. I don’t think I would have played the “Hammerklavier” without the pandemic.
‘It’s funny because before that, when I was giving interviews, people would ask me, ‘What
