Isata Kanneh-Mason’s American Album

courtesy of Crossover Media

British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason made her recording debut on the Decca album entitled Romance: The Piano Music of Clara Schumann, which was released in July of 2019. Almost exactly two years later (this past July 9), Decca released her second album entitled simply Summertime. This is almost entirely an American album with what one might call minimal British influences. The most explicit of those is the B minor (second) impromptu composed by Samuel Taylor-Coleridge. Much less explicit is George Gershwin’s 1944 arrangement of his song “The Man I Love,” which was arranged for performance by Percy Grainger, who was born in Australia but became an American citizen in 1918, after having been active in England between 1901 and 1914.

The rest of the album is unabashedly American. The Gershwin selections include the three piano preludes and two of Earl Wild’s virtuoso arrangements of Gershwin songs, “I Got Rhythm,” which is the sixth piece in Wild’s Seven Virtuoso Etudes collection, and “Summertime,” which is the second movement of Wild’s Grand Fantasy on Porgy and Bess. Samuel Barber is represented by two seldom-performed compositions, his Opus 33 nocturne, composed as an homage to John Field, and the four-movement Opus 26 sonata in E-flat major.

The one Copland selection also does not receive much attention, “The Cat and the Mouse,” which the composer called a “Scherzo Humoristique.” That is preceded by the only Amy Beach selection on the album, her Opus 114 entitled “By the Still Waters.” Finally, there are arrangements by Taylor-Coleridge of three American sources, the spirituals “Deep River” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” separated by the Haitian “bamboula” dance, which was very popular along the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico during the eighteenth century.

I have to confess that I was impressed with the track listing even before listening to the album. The Gershwin preludes were about as close as the repertoire got to familiarity. The songs, of course, will be familiar to most listeners. However, the ways in which they were set for solo piano are all decidedly unique and make for stimulating listening. Then, of course, there are the “unexpected gems,” such as listening to the fugue that Barber composed for the final movement of his sonata.

Taken as a whole, this is the sort of album that is likely to disclose new revelations over the course of a series of listening experiences; and I look forward to having those experiences play out in the near future.