Chopin - Beethoven Son... - Beatrice Rana - Audio CD (Arrives in 50 days)

Beatrice Rana is a pianist of “fire and poetry, imagination and originality, temperament and charm, all on top of fearless technical address,” as Gramophone writes. She has now recorded an album of two monumental sonatas: Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ op 106 and Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ op 35.

Completed some 20 years apart (1818 and 1839 respectively), both sonatas are in the key of B flat major. Rana has been playing the Chopin in public for more than a decade, but it was during the confinement of the pandemic that she first studied the Beethoven intensely. “I really found a deep connection with this music, especially because of the isolation … Despite the fact that it reflected so much of what was going on at that time, it’s a very positive piece ... It is a very human sonata, but the Chopin sonata is human in a very different way.”

She concludes that both works “transcend the human condition in very different ways – but not altogether different … They both have so much to do with the fear of death, with the fear of loneliness. Each finds a solution in different ways.”

Label: Plg | Origin: Holland