Throughout the recital by British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason on Tuesday at Bourgie Hall, it was impossible not to ask nagging questions: what determines a career, what brought this pianist on this scene and what can possibly justify the “ buzz ” around her ?
“Give us back Jimmy Brière!” » This personal and symbolic rallying cry gradually spread to us as Miss Kanneh-Mason, from the Kanneh-Mason dynasty of Nottingham (her brother, a cellist, recorded “the” Elgar concerto with Sir Simon and there has so many musicians in the family that they can record Carnival of the Animals all by themselves, all on Decca) rattled off the notes of his recital.
Screen
Jimmy Brière, today a full professor of piano at the University of Montreal, was 20 years ago a young pianist fresh from our educational establishments who was trying to break through. He never had a “great career”, but we have good musical memories of him and what would have really interested us would have been to hear the same program, exactly, behind a screen, on the one hand under the fingers of ‘Isata Kanneh-Mason, whom promoters are snapping up under the pressure of triumphant marketing, and on the other hand under those of this Jimmy Brière, of whom “nobody” in this same ” music business » did not want in the past. That would have been extremely interesting.
On Tuesday evening we heard an excellent pianist, who has assimilated all the technical skills allowing her to press the right key at the right time. We have already expressed here our “jealousy” towards the world of sport, where the objective discrimination between a hockey player or a star footballer and a 2nd division athlete is clear.
In the artistic field, this distinction is all the more disrupted as the prose of pseudo-critics copying press kits is now mixed in an undifferentiated manner and under the cover of “all opinions are equal”. Just this Tuesday, a publisher was amused on social networks to see a laudatory comment on his latest production, a record that had not yet been released or broadcast, appear on a European site specializing in custom sycophancy. “When will the critique even before recording? », he laughed…
Binder
All this to say that the current status of the pianist we heard on Tuesday quickly appeared to us as an enigma. Her qualities are obvious: she is very solid and knows how to make a piano sound, which we noticed in her Piano Sonata by Barber on his CD “ Summertime “. She thus succeeds in Final of the 3rd Sonata by Chopin and the “ strepido ” of the Sonata by Fanny Mendelssohn. The passage that we didn’t see her doing as well is the end of the Children’s scenes, of very beautiful equality and temperance. There was also some lovely resonance play in Haydn’s slow movement.
But, moreover, we are in the piano, much more than in the music. The notes are there, but what is missing is the link between them, the texture, what we can sometimes call the “ voicing “. More obvious, from Haydn’s Sonata: it lacks the variety of touch from which the spirit derives. At this stage (Haydn is a classical composer who did not have very differentiated instruments) this could possibly be seen as an aesthetic choice. But everything in Fanny Mendelssohn, too, was approached technically, almost mechanically.
Suddenly the musical dramaturgy falls by the wayside. This can be seen in several tables of Children’s scenes who do not breathe with the necessary subtlety, but it is terrible in the 3rd Sonata by Chopin. How will a given accumulation of energy be resolved in a given agreement, at a given moment, by a given nuance or a given texture? All these dimensions which make up the very essence of music seem terra incognito for Isata Kanneh-Mason. The 2nd theme of the 2nd movement is almost unrecognizable, it is so uttered, more than sung.
The CD “Summertime” from Decca, rather presentable, in no way predicted the disappointment of this recital in a repertoire that was certainly otherwise intractable. The disillusionment on the part of Isata Kanneh-Mason is the same as that we had with Danny Driver for example. We will soon console ourselves with Shaghayegh Nosrati opening the Bach Festival or Llŷr Williams in recital in Bourgie.