Isata Kanneh Mason Cuentos de la Infancia (2023)

Decca Classics is delighted to announce that pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason’s third album ‘Childhood Tales’ will be released worldwide on 26 May 2023. Continuing her developing legacy with Decca Classics that began in 2019, this album uses Dolby Atmos Technology to capture Isata’s signature virtuosic flair.

For the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth, Isata Kanneh-Mason takes us on a journey through the composer’s extraordinary life with her stunning debut album on Decca Classics. Isata will be joining forces with an all-female line-up to champion the significance of women musicians throughout the years, and their influence on the classical musical canon. The recording features Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, written at the age of fourteen, performed by the composer at Leipzig Gewandhaus two years later under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn.

Vibrant young pianist, Isata Kanneh-Mason, presents her sparkling second album, Summertime, as she takes us on a journey through the musical landscape of 20th century America. Isata brings her signature flair to this virtuosic and spiritual music for solo piano, including a world premiere recording of a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor piece, the fiercely challenging Barber sonata, and dazzling arrangements of Gershwin's songs.

Classical music's star duo Sheku & Isata Sheku Kanneh-Mason have performed together all over the world. Now they present an impassioned programme of Barber & Rachmaninov, including each composer's Cello Sonata and a selection of beautiful songs transcribed for cello. The siblings have performed the sonatas many times and had prepared this specific programme for a tour when the pandemic hit. Instead, they turned to the recording studio to share their music.

Isata Kanneh-Mason said, “I am delighted to be presenting my second solo album Summertime, which features a rich array of pieces from many of my favourite American classical composers. The Barber ‘Piano Sonata’ forms the anchor around which the rest of the album was developed; I fell in love with the piece the first time I heard it, and it’s a real pleasure to have recorded it for Decca. I wanted this album to illustrate the diversity of music in America at that time, and so it was important to me to include the more familiar Gershwin songs, as well as the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor spirituals to which I feel a personal connection.”

‘Mendelssohn’ explores three facets of one of the most famous names in classical music: the glittering Piano Concerto No.1 by Felix with the London Mozart Players; the long-lost ‘Easter Sonata’ by his sister Fanny as well as transcriptions by other composers of Mendelssohn’s most famous music. In 2024, Isata featured in the critically acclaimed film ‘The Other Mendelssohn’, exploring the life of the exceptionally talented by overlooked Fanny Mendelssohn, later Fanny Hensel. In the film, they uncover the fact that the Easter Sonata, a piece lost for 150 years, was in fact written by Fanny, not Felix. Isata was the first artist to perform the work attributed to the correct composer. The album features this world premiere recording of the new urtext edition of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Easter Sonata. As well as beautiful solo piano transcriptions by Liszt (‘On Wings of Song’) and Rachmaninov (‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’), and two of Felix’s ‘Songs Without Words’ and Fanny’s ‘Nocturne’, also for solo piano.