Beatrice Rana casts magic from the piano
A sorceress came to Boston, playing Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy
Photo courtesy of Simon Fowler
Prokofiev’s Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Debussy’s Études Bk. 2, Tchaikovsky-Pletnev’s Selections from The Nutcracker Suite, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 in A Major
Beatrice Rana, piano
Celebrity Series of Boston
NEC Jordan Hall
Nov. 8, 2025
On Saturday, Nov. 8, pianist Beatrice Rana presented works by Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. A close look at her program reveals evidence of thoughtful curation. A myriad of connections linked the four pieces she played to one another with intermission serving as a mirror, reflecting genre and historical context across the break.
Rana began with four scenes from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, arranged for piano by the composer himself. Composed in 1935, Romeo and Juliet has remained a staple in concert halls to this day. The same cannot be said for Rana’s next work, the second volume of Debussy’s Études. This set’s six studies, composed in 1915 amid World War I, were among Debussy’s last notes ever put to paper, who, by that stage in his life, was waning in both physical fortitude and musical relevance. The audience of his time greeted these works with confusion, and many believed that he had lost his touch; the audiences of today almost never encounter these works at all.
After the intermission, Rana played three pieces from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, arranged by contemporary virtuoso Mikhail Pletnev. Tchaikovsky composed The Nutcracker in 1892 at the height of his international fame, which has only increased since. Although completed a year before Tchaikovsky’s death, The Nutcracker bears no mark of its creator’s demise, exuding all the beauty and charm expected of a Tchaikovsky ballet.
In stark contrast, Rana wrapped up the night with Prokofiev’s Sixth Piano Sonata, the first of three “War Sonatas” composed during World War II. A cold, tormented, brutal work, the Sixth Sonata does not hold the listener’s hand through its dissonance. In 1948, the Sonata was one of many of Prokofiev’s pieces banned from performance by Soviet authorities in a decree that denounced “cacophonous” and “formalist” music. Posterity has honored the Sonata with a continued presence on the concert stage ever since its creation.
If Rana’s program could be summarized in one word, it would be “virtuosic.” Debussy’s homage to Chopin’s pianistic revolution did not disappoint in its technical innovation. Any texture that produced a wash of sound, be it a perpetual stream of notes or a cascading series of chords, left the execution of such as an exercise for the interpreter. Meanwhile, Pletnev’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker was only for ten fingers. Oftentimes, an illusory third hand seemed to fill in a missing flourish, melody, or simply extra sound. The caliber of acrobatics and dexterity demanded by this piece would make Liszt blush. Finally, Prokofiev’s sonata book ended the evening with his characteristic athleticism and seeming disregard for the long-term health of the performer’s arms. Breathless runs and percussive explosions were equally at home in the works of this Russian composer-pianist.
None of these Herculean challenges fazed Rana in the slightest. Always poised for action, she traversed the keyboard with ease, making risky leaps appear effortless. Rapid series of notes were not played out like a typewriter, but rather swept up into one gesture, as if her fingers were smooth like butter. These exhilarating waves of sound were legion in Debussy’s Études and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. In both Prokofiev works, she attacked accents like Martha Argerich — piercing, elastic punches that dissipated as soon as they happened. In the first movement of the Prokofiev sonata, she even struck the piano with a clenched fist. Throughout the concert, she never gave even a hint of being winded.
However, the core of Rana’s programming was not in its flashy virtuosity. The majority of her performance was not bombastic thunder or supersonic motion; it was abstract, unforgiving, impenetrable music. Prokofiev was always notorious for his acerbic harmonic language, even in the lyrical expressiveness of some of his dramatic works, such as Romeo and Juliet. Debussy, beloved for his earlier sensual harmonic explorations, had moved towards a harsher, crunchier sound by the time of the Études. Only in the Tchaikovsky would one find a lush and familiar harmonic stability.
In musical form, the program contained another dichotomy within. Each half began with dramatic character pieces and ended with more serious “absolute” music. Contrast was the name of the game in the ballet suites, yet between the two, the Prokofiev relied more on shocking juxtapositions while the Tchaikovsky played with subtler gradations in style. The cerebral second halves, both theoretical, differed greatly in their musical outlooks. Debussy’s Études felt as much a compositional exercise for himself as it was a musical one for the performer. Form was but a suggestion, an invisible structural framework in which sonic events popped in and out of focus. The Prokofiev sonata, clearly linear in direction and structural in conception, was a different beast entirely. Tonality was but a distant memory, traditional harmony long since obliterated with only shards left to pick up in the debris.
Despite these interpretive challenges, Rana unveiled her secret identity as a sorceress. The name of the tenth Debussy étude, “For opposing sonorities,” served as a microcosm of her whole performance. She played as an artist would make a collage, pitting disparate ideas in relief beside each other. Each musical line was given its own universe, unique sound worlds separated in both space and time. Miraculously, Rana superimposed these worlds on top of one another in ways that seemed to defy the physics of the piano. Wet and dry textures somehow existed simultaneously within the same resonant chamber, and her foot possessed a magic that allowed her to coax miracles from the instrument.
Rana’s hierarchy of sound allowed her to achieve crystalline clarity in moments of dense texture. In the seventh Debussy étude, she manipulated the rapid haze of the chromatic line, nimbly swerving around corners, all the while an unrelated, unassuming melody emerged unbothered by the buzz around it. Rana most obviously displayed balance of her lines in the soaring melodies that populated the ballet suites, the “Intermezzo” of the Tchaikovsky being especially moving. She conjured an ocean of sound that dissolved into a sparkly sea of C Major, studded with stars beaming out the final slow descending arpeggio. In “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” her wizardry turned the piano into a celesta, the bell-like instrument that plays the theme in the orchestral version.
However, Rana sometimes faltered in her quest for clarity. In the plodding chords of “The Montagues and the Capulets” from Romeo and Juliet, the theme was swallowed by the sheer volume of the piano’s bass range. Similarly, she started the last Debussy étude, “Pour les accords,” noisy, muddy, and a little overbearing, but corrected course upon the return of the opening material. Despite this, what Rana may have lost in loud moments was certainly more than made up for in the quiet ones. She delivered impossible pianissimos in moments of scintillating stasis in the Debussy Études (8, 10, 11), and the mournful end of the middle of the Prokofiev Sonata’s third movement retreated into a nearly silent collapse of unutterable anguish.
With the fourth movement’s relentless drive to its explosive end, Beatrice Rana left the audience with no choice but to erupt in a standing ovation at the conclusion of the dazzling evening.