Isata Kanneh-Mason Launches New SFP Season

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (photograph by Robin Clewley, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its 2023–24 season with the first program in its Piano Series, a solo recital by Isata Kanneh-Mason. This was her second SFP appearance, having made her solo debut in Herbst Theatre on March 8, 2022. That program featured two female composers, Sofia Gubaidulina and Eleanor Alberga, the latter offering “Cwicseolfor,” which had been only recently completed.

This time three of the four selections on the program were composed during the nineteenth century, and only one was the product of a woman. That latter was Fanny Mendelssohn’s “Easter Sonata,” whose manuscript was lost and only resurfaced in Paris in 1970. Since it was signed “F. Mendelssohn,” it was attributed to Felix; and it was only after prodigious musicological research (including analysis of the manuscript paper) that the music was acknowledged as Fanny’s. The program note by Eric Bromberger suggested that the “program” behind the four-movement sonata had more to do with Good Friday than with Easter, with the final movement providing an intense account of the Crucifixion, concluding with a fantasia on a traditional chorale. For the most part, however, the movements were well-structured and relatively brief.

The major part of the program involved two contemporaries of the Mendelssohns, presented during the second half. The first composer was Robert Schumann, represented by one of his most familiar compositions, his Opus 15 Kinderszenen suite. This was followed by Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 58 (third) sonata in B minor. Kanneh-Mason then decided that the audience could do with more Chopin, and she selected the last of the 24 preludes, in the key of D minor, in his Opus 28 collection for her encore.

Her approach to Schumann was, for the most part, quietly understated. This allowed the attentive listener to explore the many subtle turns of phrase in the cycle’s thirteen brief movements, rather than just recognizing a series of familiar tunes. Chopin was given a decidedly more intense treatment, which might even have been called aggressive. Personally, I find that Chopin’s comfort zone was in the domain of brevity. That principle was clearly evident to the extent that Kanneh-Mason’s eyebrow-raising account of the D minor prelude overshadowed all of the well-honed technique that she brought to the Opus 58 sonata.

Fortunately, the sonata genre was given a much more satisfying account (by a rather earlier composer) at the very beginning of the program. Following my oft-quoted precept of Leonard Slatkin (“You can never conduct enough Haydn or Schubert”), Kanneh-Mason began her program with its only eighteenth-century offering, Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XVI/50 sonata in C major. True to Haydn’s spirit, she was delightfully playful and knew how to shape each phrase with its own characteristic set of dispositions. I must also confess that I took more than a little comfort in the fact that Haydn “launched” not only Kanneh-Mason’s recital but also the entire SFP season! Haydn himself composed several depictions of a rising sun, and Kanneh-Mason admirably accounted for the “dawn” of the new SF season.