Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano
The Yale Gordon Young Artist Concert
Location: Shriver Hall
Isata Kanneh-Mason opens the season with a powerful solo debut following two sold-out chamber music performances at Shriver Hall Concert Series. “A profound and greatly gifted artist who radiates warmth, joy, and much-needed musical sunshine” (Gramophone), the chart-topping British pianist performs an inventive program featuring a bravura Haydn work and Chopin’s masterful final sonata, a thrilling journey of virtuosity and emotional depth.
Kanneh-Mason "brings real verve and excitement." —The Guardian
About the sponsor
Yale Gordon first sponsored a concert by an accomplished young artist in 1978. The following year, his Yale Gordon Foundation made its initial contribution to Shriver Hall Concert Series. The Foundation eventually evolved into The Peggy and Yale Gordon Trust, which has been sponsoring annual Series concerts since 1986. The Yale Gordon Young Artist Concert features soloists or ensembles with great promise in the formative stages of their careers. Many of the artists who debuted at Shriver Hall through this concert have developed or already have international careers. The Board of Directors of the Series is deeply grateful to the Trust and its officials, Phyllis and Louis Friedman, and the late Sidney Sherr and Loraine Bernstein, for their warmly welcomed support and encouragement in making the Yale Gordon programs so successful over the years.
Isata Kanneh-Mason
Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason is in great demand internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. She offers eclectic and interesting repertoire with recital programmes encompassing music from Haydn and Mozart via Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, Chopin and Brahms to Gershwin and beyond. In concerto, she is equally at home in Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann (whose piano concerto featured on Isata’s chart-topping debut recording) as in Prokofiev and Dohnányi.
Highlights of the 23/24 season include performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra Ottawa, London Mozart Players, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on tour in the USA and Germany, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Cleveland Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, and Stockholm Philharmonic. With her cellist brother, Sheku, she appears in recital in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in addition to an extensive European recital tour. Isata also gives a series of solo recitals on tour in the USA and Canada as well as at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Lucerne Festival, and across Germany.
In 2022/23 Isata made successful debuts at the Barbican, Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore halls in London, the Philharmonie Berlin, National Concert Hall Dublin, Perth Concert Hall and Prinzregententheater Munich. As concerto soloist, she appeared with orchestras such as the New World Symphony Miami, City of Birmingham Symphony, Barcelona Symphony, Geneva Chamber Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic and was the Artist in Residence with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Isata is a Decca Classics recording artist. Her 2019 album, Romance – the Piano Music of Clara Schumann, entered the UK classical charts at No. 1, Gramophone magazine extolling the recording as “one of the most charming and engaging debuts”. This was followed by 2021’s Summertime, featuring 20th-century American repertoire including a world premiere recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Impromptu in B minor and 2023’s endearingly titled album Childhood Tales is a tour-de-force showcase of music inspired by a nostalgia for youth.
2021 also saw the release of Isata’s first duo album, Muse, with her brother Sheku Kanneh-Mason, demonstrating the siblings’ musical empathy and rapport borne from years of playing and performing together. Isata and Sheku were selected to perform in recital during the 2020 BBC Proms, which was a vastly reduced festival due to the Covid-19 pandemic and they performed for cameras to an empty auditorium. 2023 sees her BBC Proms solo debut, this time to a fully open Royal Albert Hall, alongside Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Isata was an ECHO Rising Star in 21/22 performing in many of Europe’s finest halls and she is also the recipient of the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award, an Opus Klassik award for best young artist and is one of the Konzerthaus Dortmund’s Junge Wilde artists.
"Kanneh-Mason's performance moved me to tears. What more can I say?" —Gramophone