Isata Kanneh-Mason’s SFP Recital Debut

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (photograph by Robin Clewley, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Isata Kanneh-Mason made her San Francisco Performances (SFP) recital debut presenting the fourth of the five solo concerts in the SFP Piano Series. She took a generously broad approach to repertoire, and the high point of the program involved two relatively recent compositions on either side of the intermission. Indeed, the post-intermission offering by Eleanor Alberga was so new that, when the program for Kanneh-Mason’s recital was announced on this site about a month ago, it had not yet been given a title. That title is “Cwicseolfor,” the ancient spelling of the noun “quicksilver;” and there was a hyper-charged intensity to Alberga’s impressions of an element that is liquid, intriguingly shiny, and fatally toxic.

The pandemic turned out to provide me with several excellent opportunities to get to know Alberga’s compositions. That included a live-streamed performance of her second string quartet performed by the Telegraph Quartet in October of 2020 (which included a video of a telephone interview with the composer) and Navona Records’ release of an album of her chamber music entitled Wild Blue Yonder. “Wild” was equally applicable to “Cwicseolfor,” whose fast-paced intensity made for an experience tantamount to an amusement park ride, particularly in light of the focused precision that Kanneh-Mason brought to her account of the score.

The work that preceded the intermission was not quite so recent, having been composed in 1962. However, Sofia Gubaidulina only began to receive attention in this country after the 21st century had begun. Kanneh-Mason played her “Chaconne,” which I had been fortunate enough to encounter previously when Sarah Cahill included it in a piano recital for an SFP Salon program at the Hotel Rex, which she entitled Chaconnes, Revisited. This composition took the attentive listener on a ride as wild as the “Cwicseolfor” performance, reminding me that my first impression of the music was that it “was the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what [Ferruccio] Busoni had done to Bach.” By coupling Gubaidulina and Alberga on either side of the intermission, Kanneh-Mason left no doubt of the extreme virtuosity of her technical skills.

Those skills served her equally well in her approach to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff. She performed five of the compositions that he collected in his Opus 39 entitled Études-Tableaux. She rose to the technical challenges imposed by each of the pieces she selected; and, at the same time, she established just the right rhetorical devices to make sure the attentive listener realized that performance was not just a matter of jumping through all the hoops gracefully. (Following Nikolay Khozyainov’s recital this past Sunday afternoon, this seems to be a good week for Rachmaninoff.)

Sadly, music from earlier centuries did not come across as equally convincing. Her approach to Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 38 (second) ballade in F major tended to dwell more on technique than on rhetorical expressiveness. However, most disappointing were the two First Viennese School compositions that framed then entire program. The opening performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 457 sonata in C minor never seemed to get beyond making sure that all the notes were in the right place. The concluding selection, the account of the first of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 2 sonatas, written in the key of F minor, also came across as more dutiful than rhetorical.

Fortunately, the encore that followed was more satisfying. This was the first of the three preludes that George Gershwin composed for solo piano. It also happens to be one of the tracks on Kanneh-Mason’s Summertime album. Apparently, she finds the recent past far more accommodating that either the nineteenth or the eighteenth century.