Alastair Macaulay: A bewilderingly brilliant London debut

Alastair Macaulay: A bewilderingly brilliant London debut

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norman lebrecht

July 06, 2022

Our reviewer went to hear the fifth member of the Kanneh-Mason family perform at St-Martin-in-the Fields:
By Alastair Macaulay

On Tuesday 5 July, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, nineteen years old and surely the longest-limbed pianist of my experience, made her London solo debut recital at St Martin in the Fields. She wore a light, full-length dress of cobalt blue, with little by way of jewellery, and hair pouring past her waist. Her manners were modest, her qualities exceptional. Her programme took her audience from the classicism of Bach and Mozart to the Romanticism of Liszt, Scriabin, and Coleridge-Taylor. Her style is one fascinating oxymoron after another: tender objectivity, rapturous unobtrusiveness, quiet brilliance, even dispassionate passion.

She’s the fifth of seven young Kanneh-Mason siblings, all from Nottinghamshire, all of them playing piano, violin, and/or cello. (She doubles as a cellist, though did not do so on this occasion.) Two of her elder siblings – her brother Sheku (cello) and her sister (piano) Isata – share a recital at the Wigmore Hall next week.

Whereas the long limbs of some teenage ballerinas flash out with startling height, hers are quietly, calmly deployed – and yet what you hear has the same startling precision, sweep, and attack as the dancing of Darcey Bussell in the 1980s or, today, New York City Ballet’s Mira Nadon. Although Kanneh-Mason blithely moves both her torso and her head while she plays, the line of her shoulders stays largely tranquil. At the recital’s end, as she progressed through the many insidious facets of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no 2, the music’s stirring effect made several members of the audience sway and gesture more than she ever did.

In Bach’s Prelude and Fugue C sharp major, she perfectly balanced all the music’s layers: melody on melody, metre within metre, pattern within pattern. A marvellous cantabile (singing) quality distinguished every thread of Mozart’s Sonata in D Major K 576. Always rhythmically firm, it felt close to an operatic ensemble.

Kanneh-Mason’s quality of rapture came to the fore in Scriabin’s piano sonata no 2. This is music that swells, flows, and quietens like water. While showing the underlying rhythmic structure, she released multiple textures – painting the larger scenes like pointillist seascapes, showing the accumulating power of its waves, and marvellously focusing the coruscating kaleidoscope of its climaxes.

After the interval, she began with pieces by Scriabin’s contemporary, the British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912): three from his collection of Negro Melodies, ‘At the Dawn of Day’, ‘The Stories are Very Hard’, ‘Take Nabandji’”, and his Impromptu No 2 in B minor. Although I’ve loved Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast since childhood, I’m sorry that I’d never listened to any other music by him. (Nor had I realised he was of mixed race: part African.) The meeting of firm musical architecture, melodic power, and expressive thought in his music proves rich fare.

Kanneh-Mason ended with Liszt, to whose music she brings both classical shape and stream-of-consciousness discovery. Without strain, she showed how the “Vallée d’Obermann” (from the Années de pélérinage) is both mountainscape music and psychodrama. We could feel how Liszt, applying dissonance with unnerving pressure and playing off sonic highs and lows, creates heroically picturesque effects and then pushes them into intense expressions of a febrile nervous system.

She followed this with the second Hungarian Rhapsody, the most famous of Liszt’s set of nineteen highly influential Hungarian rhapsodies: music in which Liszt (like other composers) dramatises nineteenth-century nationalism. Kanneh-Mason played this with affection, verve, fervour. As the rhapsody developed, she made some of his more outrageous effects sound impish, funny, thrilling.

I noticed that the woman immediately in front of me couldn’t keep still in her seat. Then I saw that people on the other side of the aisle were moving arms, legs, torsos to this irresistible music. Yet turn your eyes back to Kanneh-Mason herself and you saw that the source of this spell remained almost demure in her physical composure. The internal variety of this impressively mature young musician is all the more fascinating when you’re in her presence. You’re startled by how you just can’t see what you can’t help hearing.

 

Comments

  • Laura says:

    Interesting review sullied by opening with a review of her clothing, hair, and jewelry. Note to reviewers: STOP IT.

    • V.Lind says:

      It’s often a point worth making, especially around here, but in this review the description of this young artist, unknown to most of us, was relevant to Mr. Macaulay’s presentation of what exactly was going on in that hall on that particular night.

      I did not feel the physical description discordant — it was part of making me see and hear his experience. I got the impression of a striking young woman who did her best not to draw attention to herself — unlike many of her peers on a platform — who simply was subsumed by the music she was playing. And his account of how she delivered it went as far as a music review can to make the reader hear what he heard. It is ideal reviewing.

    • just saying says:

      Hope you don’t read any reviews of Yuja Wang then! lol

  • Bulgakov says:

    What a beautifully written review! Makes me really want to hear her in concert.

  • Elizabeth Owen says:

    “On Tuesday 5 July, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, nineteen years old and surely the longest-limbed pianist of my experience, made her London solo debut recital at St Martin in the Fields. She wore a light, full-length dress of cobalt blue, with little by way of jewellery, and hair pouring past her waist. Her manners were modest, her qualities exceptional.”

    What a ridiculous review, who is this man? Let’s hope he makes a point of telling us what a male pianist wears and how he conducts himself and whether he is long limbed. It’s amazing to think that an alleged reviewer of music does not know that Coleridge-Taylor was mixed race and goodness only knows what his final sentence means.
    Surely you can find someone better qualified as a reviewer Norman.

    • zeno north says:

      Thanks for putting together the words that my brain couldn’t manage for a couple of minutes after reading this…..”review”. I lack the words to describe how “professionally amateurish” the writing is.

    • NYer says:

      The reviewer is the former long term DANCE critic of the New York Times.

    • MWnyc says:

      When male musicians get to wear anything more interesting than a black tuxedo or dark-colored suit (or something “daring” like Eschenbach’s black Nehru jacket), their clothing choices will be commented on as well.

      If you don’t think female musicians should have their choices of attire commented on, then you should advocate for them to dress as boringly as male musicians are expected to do.

      (No one ever comments on the outfits worn onstage by, for instance, the greats Mitsuko Uchida and Maria João Pires because they never wear anything worthy of comment. I suspect they would tell us that they want nothing to distract from the music.)

  • Sixtus Beckmesser says:

    Alistair Macaulay is a former New York Times dance critic who earned notoriety when he described a dancer in the City Ballet’s production of Nutcracker as having eaten “one sugarplum too many.” Why on earth is he reviewing a piano recital? His comments about Ms. Kanneh-Mason’s appearance are completely beside the point.

  • jansumi says:

    It’d be interesting to hear how she feels about this review… I came for the comments to read what I was thinking. Yup. I’d expect better from Macaulay actually. But if he really felt the need to describe the the quality of her presence, he still could’ve summed it up, with that audience reaction alone making the point, in a couple of sentences. I guess this was really a dance review.

  • James Minch says:

    ‘Although I’ve loved Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast since childhood, I’m sorry that I’d never listened to any other music by him. (Nor had I realised he was of mixed race: part African.)’

    Who is this ignoramus?

    Miss Kanneh-Mason herself needs to decide whether she wants to be a professional musician or a professional black person.

    • Portobadisco says:

      Wow, what an ignorant comment. Was there anything in the review that suggests to you that she didn’t want to be a professional musician?

  • James Minch says:

    ‘hair pouring past her waist’

    Does this man not know the ‘hair’ is not real?

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