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.