Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

“Beware! I put on this disc and found myself barely able to move for the 78 minutes of Bach’s masterpiece, so familiar yet suddenly so new. Rana’s playing has a kind of Orphic seductiveness, a transcendent lightness of touch. She yields little to Glenn Gould in mercuriality and fleetness (her toccatas are “brio” at its most devastating), and lacks his tendentiousness. How beautifully she draws the bemused interior phrasing of variation XIII, or the plangent dissonance of the extended “Black Pearl” variation XXV. A supremely intelligent reading”. – The Times
“This recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations is Italian pianist Beatrice Rana’s second album for Warner Classics. In 2016 I reviewed her splendid first Warner release of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 which made quite an impression
Beatrice Rana is a pianist who makes you sit up and take notice. Her striking recording will sit agreeably alongside my favourite Goldberg recordings: Rosalyn Tureck’s aristocratic 1998 Hamburg account, so full of perception, is on Deutsche Grammophon. Glenn Gould's1981 New York City recording on Sony is very enjoyable too, albeit rather headstrong for some. For those preferring a harpsichord, the 1965 recording on Teldec by early music specialist Gustav Leonhardt is admirable for its directness of approach”. -Michael Cookson
“She’s absolutely extraordinary, she’s totally thought through the music. She has her own take on it without being idiosyncratic, she writes an extraordinary interesting, intellectually probing but very humble note in the booklet. If you think back to when Glenn Gould recorded the 1955, the early fast and joyous, Goldbergs he was a year younger than rana, and I also think of Julia Fischer doing the Sonatas and partitas for Violin at the age of 21. It might be a bit silly to talk about people like Gould and Fischer, but I think Rana is up there, she’s got something really interesting and very personal to say.”- BBC Radio 3 Record Review