Isata Kanneh-Mason’s new album options music by brother and sister Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.
Karolina Wielocha/Decca Classics
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Karolina Wielocha/Decca Classics
The 28-year-old pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason is aware of a factor or two about household dynamics. She’s the eldest of seven younger, classically skilled siblings from England. (Chances are you’ll know her brother, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, whose profession launched after performing on the wedding ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.) Maybe that’s why she selected one other musical household as the main focus of her new album, Mendelssohn.
The recording is dedicated to music by brother and sister Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn — two wildly gifted prodigies who wrote beautiful music in early nineteenth century Germany. Together with its luminous melodies, Mendelssohn tells a narrative of sibling rivalry.
The dazzling album opener — the one orchestral work on the recording — is Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a chunk that blends the rigor of Bach, the class of Mozart and the uncooked vitality of the rising Romantics, like Chopin. Kanneh-Mason’s attentive efficiency, alongside the London Mozart Gamers and conductor Jonathan Bloxham, highlights all the main points with muscle and perception. It’s price noting that in February of 1838, Fanny herself performed her brother’s concerto in what could be her solely recognized public efficiency. She would all the time be overshadowed by Felix, who loved a famous person profession, writing good, featherlight melodies, like these inside his incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night time’s Dream, two picks from which observe the concerto on Kanneh-Mason’s album.
She performs the intricate Rachmaninov association of the Scherzo at a average tempo, slower than many, however with loads of glittering fairy mud. Let’s be actual, Kanneh-Mason doesn’t have Yuja Wang’s fleet fingers. Nobody does. However not like some, she doesn’t pound her method by way of; she lets the music float in mid-air. The Nocturne, in a not often heard association by the nineteenth century pianist-composer Moritz Moszkowski, unfolds serenely — like a heat blanket defending Shakespeare’s lovers.
Fanny Mendelssohn and her brother had been inseparable. That’s till Felix and her father discouraged her goals of a profession in music. No such prejudice within the Kanneh-Mason household, the place all are supported by doting mother and father. And Isata typically performs together with her personal brother, Sheku.
Fanny wrote some 500 items of music, principally for performances in personal salons. Solely a fraction of them had been printed, together with the Notturno in G minor from 1838, the place Kanneh-Mason illuminates a wide range of moods throughout the gently swaying rhythm of a Venetian gondola tune.
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Whereas Felix’s music takes up the majority of this album, it’s Fanny’s work, particularly the enigmatic “Easter Sonata,” that’s the true treasure. The 23-minute piece is solidly constructed, with moments of febrile repose and turbulent spasms of brute energy. Fanny wrote the sonata in 1829, but it surely went lacking till 1970, when students had been satisfied — unsurprisingly — that Felix was the creator. Lastly, in 2010, new proof proved it to be Fanny’s work. And it’s clear from Kanneh-Mason’s agile and passionate efficiency that the music holds a particular place for her. The opening, she says, looks like spring, whereas the arresting remaining motion closes with delicately lit chords, shifting like a processional into the ether.
Fanny Mendelssohn died of a stroke at age 41 in 1847. Felix was heartbroken, and died six months later at 38. They might have been probably the most naturally musical brother and sister in historical past. Due to Isata Kanneh-Mason, we now have a glowing album that paperwork a few of their greatest work.