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.”