The stylish use of rubato gave a sense of dreaminess to her performance early on. The sprawling first movement never felt lost, but it strayed: assertive; then suddenly reflective, translucent; then roar again. In the finale, her game danced with appealing, almost sticky heaviness, but then the next line would kick off with sparkling freshness.
All this changeability has never evoked fear, as with other artists. Rana exudes an underlying calm, a grounded quality, with the concert’s different moods on a human scale. Small corners were intimate communication: the notes hit, with perfect clarity, through her right little finger as punctuation for her soft left hand; her trills, bright yet silky, a little mealy.
The orchestra played with panache in the third movement – and van Sweden supported artful details, such as the double basses that seemed to absorb the resonance of the piano towards the end. But it was hard to focus on anything but the central player. Even during a great flute solo in the first movement, you couldn’t take your ears off Rana. It was an unforgettable debut.
Shostakovich is from Sweden country, the kind of repertoire in which his distinctive tight grip on the music helps rather than hinders. This was a spirited, tightly played Fifth, an angry grinning take on a work whose politics will always be ambiguous. (The composer tried desperately to win Stalin’s favor, but who knows what the score’s meaning is?)
The Philharmonic played well, with an almost stifled grotesquery in the first movement, an eerie danse macabre in the second and a heady unsentimentality in the third. Van Sweden entered the finale very quickly and the orchestra responded with pure ferocity. Progress to the climax of the major key explosion was grim, and its performance, as Shostakovich may have intended, was the definition of an empty victory.
New York Philharmonic
This program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater in Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org.