Czech Philharmonic • Beatrice Rana

“I was seven years old the first time I attended an orchestra concert. I was so enchanted by Haydn that I got goosebumps. That was the first time I sensed what a powerful means of communication music represents”, recalls the pianist Beatrice Rana, who herself appeared as a soloist with orchestra just a year after that turning point in her life. Her life was filled with music from birth: she grew up in a family of pianists and begin playing piano at age four. Although no one pushed a musical career on her, she decided to study at the Nina Rota Conservatoire in Monopoli under the guidance of Benedetto Lupo, and she also attended a composition course taught by Marco della Sciucca. Her desire to improve her skill as a pianist took her to Hannover for studies with Arie Vardi, then back to Italy to study under Benedetto Lupo, this time at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

She came to the attention of musicians worldwide at age 18 by winning the Montreal International Competition and especially two years later in 2013, earning the silver medal and the audience prize at the famed Van Cliburn International Competition. Although that success launched her career on the world’s concert stages (mainly in America—she had already been giving concerts in Europe), it also gave her a feeling of great responsibility. She once revealed in an interview that for a whole season after the competition, she was living with the feeling that she had to prove herself deserving of her competition success. However, she overcame the crisis: “Suddenly I realised that I was no longer in the world of competitions, but one of concerts. And that is something much better.” Today, we can hear her at the most famous concert venues, from Royal Albert Hall to Carnegie Hall. She has played at the BBC Proms and, for example, at the Verbier Festival. She has appeared with such conductors as Yannick Nézet-Seguin, with whom she issued an album of piano concertos by Clara and Robert Schumann last year, Manfred Honeck, Paavo Järvi, and Antonio Pappano. It is with the latter that she has long collaborated with both in concert and on recordings (Rana is an exclusive Warner Classics recording artist). Their first recording with piano concertos by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky was honoured as the “Editor’s Choice” by the magazine Gramophone and as “Newcomer of the Year” by the BBC Music Magazine. Her solo recordings have also earned awards: her Goldberg Variations (2017) won prizes for “Young Artist of the Year” (Gramophone) and “Discovery of the Year” (Edison), and the album of Stravinsky and Ravel won the Diapason d’Or and the Choc de l’Année Classica.

Beatrice Rana is acclaimed for the delicacy of her touch, her naturalness, and her intelligence. “To me, she is a revelation. Her level of musical maturity and technical security is amazing for such a young person”, says Antonio Pappano, describing the quality of the 31-year-old pianist’s playing, which the Prague public already experienced at the Rudolf Firkušný Festival in 2019, when Beatrice Rana intoxicated the Rudolfinum in a programme including Chopin etudes. 

Her artistic career does not stop at the piano, however: in 2017 in Lecce, her birthplace at the heart of Apulia, she established the chamber music festival “Classiche Forme”, which soon took its place among Italy’s leading summer events. She is also the artist director of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Benevento. She currently lives in Rome.

Although the professional life of Alain Altinoglu today is not very different from that of his famed conducting colleagues, he took a truly unique path to the most prestigious concert halls and famed opera houses. He grew up in a poor suburb of Paris in a family with Armenian roots; his father was a professor of mathematics, and his mother was a pianist. He is said to have learned to read music before he knew the alphabet. He began playing the violin at age five, but he soon switched to piano, which he eventually studied, graduating from the Paris Conservatoire. However, it was the orchestral sound that the piano lacked that stayed with him: he listened to recordings of orchestral compositions and he gobbled up scores that had been collected by his grandfather. At age 20, he even had fun transcribing them for piano. This went hand-in-hand with his fascination with conducting: he enjoyed watching conductors and having discussions with them. He taught himself on his path to a conducting career, but he needed the opportunity to show what he could do.

That opportunity came by chance when at age 18 he was working as a repetiteur at Paris’s Opéra Bastille. At one of the rehearsals, it was necessary for him to stand in for the conductor Denis Russell Davies. The rehearsal went wonderfully, and the young repetiteur received great encouragement from the orchestra to pursue a conducting career. He still had a long way to go to join world’s elite conductors, and that is a part of his conducting philosophy: “To achieve the best result, you need maturity, and you need lots of time in your life. You have to be able to read between the lines. You are never finished; you have to work every day and try to understand why something did not go the way you wanted.” He sees the conductor as an intermediary between the orchestra and the listener, and he tries to convey the composer’s intentions to listeners while also presenting his own opinion.

At present he is employed as chief conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and makes many guest appearances with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. He shows his enthusiasm for opera as music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, where his current projects include the entire Ring des Nibelungen. He is often seen at other opera houses from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to London’s Covent Garden. He teaches conducting at the Paris Conservatoire, and since July 2023 he has also been the artistic director of the International Festival in Colmar. He appears with his wife, mezzo-soprano Nora Gubitch, as a pianist in recitals, and they have made many recordings of the art song repertoire in which the husband-and-wife duo specialises.

His first live performance with the Czech Philharmonic came in 2022. At the rehearsals for a programme of music by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Camille Saint-Saëns, he focused mainly on creating the authentic orchestral sound for the repertoire. As he put it: “I wanted to teach the orchestra to speak French.”

During his lifetime, the French composer, writer and music critic Hector Berlioz enjoyed greater acclaim abroad than at home. He was highly regarded in the Czech milieu, as attested to by the eminent aesthetician Otakar Hostinský’s 1881 laudatory treatise. A towering figure of Romantic music, Berlioz was a true master of instrumentation, the subject of his influential book Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes. Moreover, he promoted and applied the idée fixe (a recurring theme, commonly known as the leitmotif).

By the time Berlioz plunged into the overture Le carnaval romain, Op. 9, he had completed numerous significant pieces, including the famous Symphonie fantastique (1830). Three of the seven orchestral overtures he created, in different periods, are inspired by English literature and four are based on his own operas, such as Benvenuto Cellini (1834–1838). Focusing on episodes from the life of the Italian Mannerist sculptor and goldsmith, the opera is made up of three acts, the second of which is dominated by a great carnival scene set in the Piazza Colonna in Rome. In 1843 and 1844, Berlioz wrote the separate overture Le carnaval romain, which – unlike the opera Benvenuto Cellini – was an immediate success. He would often include the piece, dedicated to Prince von Hohenzollern-Hechingen, in the programmes of his foreign tours. The connection between the overture and the opera is clear in, for instance, the opening section of the former, whose wonderful cor anglais solo is derived from the love duet of Cellini and Teresa in the latter, and the fast Italian dance saltarello, rendering the carnival scene in the opera. One of Berlioz’s most popular works, Le carnaval romain brings to bear the composer’s ability to “replant” vocal music into instrumental sound and make brilliant use of ideas that may not have the same impact elsewhere.

Berlioz composed the opera Les Troyens between 1856 and 1858 to his own libretto, based on the epic poem The Aeneid by his beloved Ancient Roman author Publius Vergilius Maro. Considering it the culmination of his lifelong artistic endeavours, he duly created a piece of monumental proportions – the grand opera in five acts, running for about five hours, engages (besides singers) an enormous orchestra with extended wind and percussion sections. Following its revision, primarily entailing numerous cuts and adding a prologue, in 1863 the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris presented Acts 3, 4 and 5 under the title Les Troyens à Carthage. Berlioz did not live to see his opera performed in its entirety. (In this connection, Charles Gounod quipped that just like his namesake, the mythical hero Hector, Berlioz died beneath the walls of Troy.) Although the opera Les Troyens has not fared well, part of it, the orchestral introduction to Act 4, Chasse royale et orage, has thrived independently. In the opera, the scene is a pantomime, set in a forest near Carthage, with the main roles assigned to hunters, nymphs, fauns and satyrs, and the lead protagonists: Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Even though when performed in concert there is no dance, theatre effects and acting, Berlioz’s programme music, now and then onomatopoeic, conveys the action in outline.

The German composer, conductor and pianist Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was one of the major exponents of early Romanticism. Born in Hamburg, he began taking piano lessons from leading virtuosos and teachers at a tender age. Recognised early as a musical prodigy, he gave concerts at which he also presented his own pieces. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 1 in G minor, Op. 25, too is a work Mendelssohn premiered himself. Composed in 1830 and 1831 in Rome and Munich, he dedicated it to the talented 17-year-old German pianist Delphine von Schauroth (with whom, according to the biographers, he had a close relationship, or even love affair, which, however, would fade away). At the premiere, on 17 October 1831 in Munich, attended by Ludwig I, the art-loving King of Bavaria, Mendelssohn himself played the piano. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 1 became instantly popular and the solo part would soon be performed by musicians of such renown as Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann. Mendelssohn presented the work within his tours abroad, and it quickly became part of the concert repertoire and was listed among the test pieces at piano competitions. In his Evenings with the Orchestra, Hector Berlioz famously devised a “sci-fi” scene at a competition at the Conservatoire de Paris, with Mendelssohn’s concerto being played by an unstoppable, indestructible piano…

Played without a break, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in G minor comprises three movements, ushered in by brass fanfares. The first movement, Molto allegro con fuoco, begins with a surprisingly brief orchestral introduction, succeeded by vigorous solo piano, which in the 1830s was not a standard procedure. The opening section, in sonata form, is followed by the slow, melancholic Andante. The final movement, Presto – Molto allegro e vivace, in rondo form, concludes with the return of the first movement’s lyrical theme. 

Suite No. 2 from the ballet Daphnis et Chloé is one of the best-known works of Maurice Ravel, a composer of Basque-Swiss origin who spent most of his life in France. His style most notably incorporated elements of Impressionism and Neo-Classicism, as well as ethnic music and, later on, jazz and modern techniques, including Expressionism. Although embracing diverse forms and moods, Ravel’s musical idiom is singular, revealing an astonishing instrumentation dexterity. A case in point is the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), recounting an Ancient Greek myth. Ravel embarked upon the score in 1909 after receiving a commission from the impresario Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, performing in Paris at the time to great acclaim. The dance scenario was supplied by the company’s chief choreographer, Michel Fokine, who had adapted an extensive romance by the Ancient Greek author Longus, probably dating from the second century AD. Ravel summed up his approach to the ballet as follows: “My intention was to compose an immense musical fresco, less concerned with archaism than with faithfulness to the Greece of my dreams, which is similar to that imagined and depicted by French artists at the end of the eighteenth century.” As regards the musical structure of the piece, he wrote: “My work is constructed symphonically according to a very strict tonal scheme by means of a few motifs …” Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, abounding in bucolic innocence and beauty, as well as amorous passion, premiered on 8 June 1912 in Paris, featuring the Ballets Russes stars Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina.

Satisfied with the score, Ravel made use of extracts to create two orchestral suites. He wrote the first back in 1911, before the ballet had even been staged. The second, based on Act 3, dates from 1913 and consists of three parts: Lever du jour (Daybreak), Pantomime and Danse générale. Suite No. 2 exists in two versions – one solely orchestral, the other employing mixed choir (Ravel originally counted with a choir being engaged in the ballet, yet Diaghilev rejected the idea). A wizard of sound colour and master of orchestration, Ravel gave great scope to the woodwinds (unsurprisingly, given their being commonly associated with shepherds and Pan, their god…), with the orchestra including a large percussion group, as well as the enchanting celesta and harps in the Impressionist “daybreak” scene.