Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason is first and foremost a pianist but is also a composer and arranger who is passionate about chamber music, romantic repertoire and loves to bring a range of styles and composers to her performances. She offers eclectic and stimulating recital programmes with repertoire encompassing Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, to Gershwin, Dobrinka Tabakova and Coleridge Taylor. In concerto, she is equally at home in Felix Mendelssohn and Beethoven as in Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff.
“I want people’s perceptions of a piano recital to be expanded from the expected and conventional. I’d like people to leave the concert hall feeling curious about repertoire that was unfamiliar and more passionate and interested about the music they already knew. I think contrast in programming is vital for the survival of music old and new.”
Isata is in high demand from concert halls and orchestras worldwide. In July 2024, she was invited to perform at the First Night of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Symphony and conductor Elim Chan, a performance which resulted in stellar reviews in the mainstream press. Isata went on to appear as concerto soloist with the European Union Youth Orchestra and Iván Fischer in summer 2024 performing Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Highlights of the 2025/26 season included Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto with Bar Avni and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and with Petr Popelka with the Prague Radio Symphony at the Rudolfinum and she went on tour with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Isata also appeared in solo recital and in chamber music at Wigmore Hall, with further solo recital appearances at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Powell Hall in St Louis, De Bijloke in Ghent, the Howland Music Circle in New York, Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, and returned to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society among others.
The 26/27 season sees Isata give a much-anticipated recital tour in Australia and New Zealand, which also includes performances with the NZ Symphony Orchestra. She makes debuts with the Athens (Greece) State Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, Malmö Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra and returns to the Toronto Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. She has solo recitals at the Heidelberger Frühling Festival and Tivoli Copenhagen and has chamber music engagements with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Isata is a Decca Classics artist and has recorded four solo albums for the label – Romance (2019), Summertime (2021), Childhood Tales (2023), Mendelssohn (2024) and Prokoviev (2026).
Isata has received many awards, including the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award from the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and an Opus Klassik award for best young artist. She released two albums of her favourite works for intermediate and advanced piano students through ABRSM Publishing in 2023.
