Recording of the Week, Isata Kanneh-Mason plays music by the Mendelssohns

Hot on the heels of her glistening First Night of the Proms debut with the Clara Schumann concerto, Isata Kanneh-Mason’s new album shifts the focus to the music of the Mendelssohns, opening with Felix’s first piano concerto. 

This is an incisive interpretation from the off, the orchestra announcing a forthright approach on which Kanneh-Mason capitalises with aplomb. She, and the London Mozart Players under Jonathan Bloxham, bring an appropriately Classical approach to the music with a combination of brilliance, clarity and elegance that utilises the relatively small orchestral forces and the bright voicing of the piano. There is a wide dynamic range in the playing, challenging any pre-conceptions some might have of Mendelssohn being a shrinking violet of the parlour, whilst expressing some of his poetry in the quieter passages, and especially in the tenderness of the second movement.

Kanneh-Mason’s playing shows virtuosic fluidity throughout, mostly communicating the music rather than for its own sake. Excellent recordings by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Murray Perahia demonstrate greater subtlety of shading, and in the latter the piano is less spot-lit and more balanced with the orchestra. Both pianists also find a touch more of Mendelssohn the composer of ‘Songs Without Words’, and use a little more flexibility of tempo, but Kanneh-Mason’s new recording brings a valuable alternative view and reflects the quote in the booklet in which she says, “I love the energy in this concerto; the piano glitters throughout”.

The Nocturne from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (transcribed for piano by Moszkowski), brings out more of these qualities in Kanneh-Mason’s playing whilst avoiding over-sentimentality, and she achieves a pleasing ebb and flow in the Lieder ohne Worte VI, Op.67 II, Lost Illusions. It’s interesting to note that all the solo repertoire on this disc was recorded in a different venue with different engineers to the concerto, and this difference is certainly audible, the vast space and hard surfaces of St. John's Smith Square bringing brightness to the sound in the concerto, and the more reverberant acoustic of The Friary, Liverpool assisting the warmer sound of the solo pieces.

Kanneh-Mason has already proved herself a worthy champion of music by female composers, and so it’s no surprise to find the second half of this album filled with the music of Fanny Mendelssohn (née Hensel). Her Easter Sonata was lost for 150 years, misattributed to Felix and then rightly restored to Fanny's name in 2010, and it's this music that draws out some of the best playing on the album. Although I still yearn for a little more subtle colouring in some passages, Kanneh-Mason brings a good sense of structural unity through her use of dynamics and carefully controlled rubato. There is some nice shaping in the second movement, and the fugue section is very well elucidated, whilst Kanneh-Mason finds playfulness in the scherzo in both its wistful moments and the pageantry of the fanfares.

In the torment of the A-minor final movement, Kanneh-Mason negotiates the tricky left-hand split-octave figurations with panache, though it doesn’t have the cleanly defined drama and sensitive shaping demonstrated by Gaia Sokoli, on the Piano Classics label. This big-boned reading brings to a close Kanneh-Mason’s strong advocacy of a work which deserves to be heard more, and it is noted by Decca that this is the world premiere recording of the new urtext edition. Some parts of it are Schumannesque, yet Fanny Mendelssohn clearly had a voice of her own, quietened only by the societal attitudes and expectations of her time.