Isata Kanneh-Mason

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason is in great demand internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. She offers eclectic and interesting repertoire with recital programs encompassing music from Haydn and Mozart via Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, Chopin and Brahms to Gershwin and beyond. In concerto, she is equally at home in Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann (whose piano concerto featured on Isata’s chart-topping debut recording) as in Prokofiev and Dohnányi. 

Highlights of the 2023–2024 season include performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, NAC Orchestra, London Mozart Players, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on tour in the U.S.A. and Germany, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Cleveland Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Stockholm Philharmonic. With her cellist brother, Sheku, she appears in recital in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in addition to an extensive European recital tour. Isata also gives a series of solo recitals on tour in the U.S.A. and Canada, as well as at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Lucerne Festival, and across Germany. 

Isata is a Decca Classics recording artist. Her 2019 album, Romance – the Piano Music of Clara Schumann, was followed by 2021’s Summertime, featuring 20th-century American repertoire. This year’s endearingly titled album Childhood Tales is a tour-de-force showcase of music inspired by a nostalgia for youth.

2021 also saw the release of Isata’s first duo album, Muse, with her brother Sheku Kanneh-Mason, demonstrating the siblings’ musical empathy and rapport borne from years of playing and performing together. 2023 sees her BBC Proms solo debut, alongside Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. 

Isata was an ECHO Rising Star in 2021–2022 and is also the recipient of the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award and an Opus Klassik award for Best Young Artist, and is one of the Konzerthaus Dortmund’s Junge Wilde artists.