Chinese pianist Ran Jia has gained international recognition for her exceptional interpretations of Franz Schubert’s piano works. A particular milestone in her career was her debut at the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie during the 2016–2017 season: over the course of just ten days, she performed the complete Schubert sonata cycle there over four evenings. Her artistic depth is also highly regarded by music critics. In a review of her latest Mozart recording, BBC Music Magazine noted that the intellectual integrity of her playing is reminiscent of Alfred Brendel’s.
Her Hamburg debut centers on the composers who have shaped her artistic work: Schumann, Brahms, and Schubert. With a keen sense of timbre, poetic depth, and structural clarity, Ran Jia devotes herself to the Romantic piano repertoire—a tension between intimate lyricism and monumental sonic architecture. While Schumann’s Arabesque is characterized by poetic lightness and sensitive sonic imagination, Brahms’s monumental Handel Variations and Fugue unfold with great architectural power. Schubert’s final sonata, D 960, holds a special place—a work of existential breadth and quiet transcendence that has been at the center of Ran Jia’s artistic engagement with Schubert for many years.
PERFORMERS
Ran Jia Ran Jia piano
PROGRAM
Robert Schumann
Arabesque in C major, Op. 18
Johannes Brahms
Variations and Fugue on a Theme by George Frideric Handel in B major, Op. 24
- Interval -
Franz Schubert
Sonata for Piano in B-flat major, D 960
