Concert Review: Isata Kanneh-Mason at the 1900 Building

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

My birthday gift to myself was a pair of $50 tickets to a recital by Isata Kanneh-Mason at the 1900 Building on May 15. My date and I showed up forty minutes early to the general admission event to maximize the value of my extravagance.

As at a 2024 concert at Helzberg Hall, we claimed the best seats in the house from which to study the technique of the British phenomenon. She’s almost certainly one of the ten most famous living classical pianists. Approximately 225 attended the performance.

Studying Kanneh-Mason’s spider-like fingers as they scrambled across the Steinway on compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Dobrinka Tabakova dazzled us. While she’s not a particularly demonstrative pianist, the 29-year-old’s fingering was so masterful as to be magical. 

Even from twelve feet away, notes resounded that I didn’t see Kanneh-Mason strike during a reading of Tabakova’s daring "Halo". (My partner later explained that an ingenious use of pedals lay behind the mystery.)

Better still, Kanneh-Mason almost imperceptibly lingered on the dissonance passages of each work. Emphasizing Beethoven’s brutality rather than his melodic sweetness provided me with new insights into the titan. Happy birthday to me.

Concert Review: Garibaldi Trio at the 1900 Building

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

Dmitri Atapine encouraged an audience of 200 to renounce the term “new music” during his introduction of Garibaldi Trio’s recital at the 1900 Building on Thursday, January 30. The co-Artistic Director of The Friends of Chamber Music noted that all music was once new. Besides, he said, what’s new today inevitably grows old.

Musical semantics don’t interest me as much as experiencing fresh sounds. The evening reminded me that institutional suppression of progressive music is just as pervasive in the classical realm as it is in jazz. 

I was both ashamed and angry as I experienced works by Stephen Chatman, Lowell Liebermann and Dobrinka Tabakove for the first time. Thanks to my fixation with ECM Records, I’d previously encountered Jörg Widmann’s outlandish Fünf Bruchstücke for clarinet and piano.

Rendered by the charismatic trio of clarinetist José Franch-Ballester, pianist David Fung and violist Marina Thibeault, all four pieces resounded like indispensable components of the classical repertoire. The discounted ticket I purchased on a whim for $10 two months ago revealed previously concealed universes.

Album Review: Lívia Nestrovski and Henrique Eisenmann- Nação

I was exasperated upon discovering no album existed to accompany a so-called “album release concert” by vocalist Lívia Nestrovski and pianist Henrique Eisenmann in the Kansas City area four months ago. Even though the Brazilian duo’s characterization of their appearance in the heart of the Midwest in that fashion was patently nonsensical, I was desperate to confirm my unqualified enthusiasm for their recital at the 1900 Building. Nação is finally here. Sort of. The album streams at Spotify and YouTube, but it doesn’t seem to be available at Amazon, Apple, Bandcamp or Tidal. Nação’s unadorned romantic and playful art songs replicate what the duo sounded like in Mission Woods, Kansas.