Isata Kanneh-Mason

Isata Kanneh-Mason stands as the eldest among the seven performing siblings in her family and has built a profile that combines critical recognition with strong commercial results. She appears both alone and alongside her brothers and sisters or additional collaborators. Although her trajectory advanced more gradually than those of several younger family members, momentum increased markedly in the early 2020s through major awards and the arrival of multiple well-received Decca recordings. In 2024 she issued the album Mendelssohn.

Born in Nottingham on 27 May 1996, she grew up in England’s East Midlands. Her father, Stuart Mason, works as a business executive and traces his roots to Antigua; her mother, Kadiatu Kanneh, teaches at university level after arriving from Sierra Leone and later documented family life in the memoir Raising the Kanneh-Masons. Following the pattern of most of her siblings, Isata trained at the Royal Academy of Music. As an Elton John Scholar she completed her undergraduate studies there and joined her patron for a 2013 performance in Los Angeles. She returned to the Academy for a master’s degree completed in 2020 under Carole Presland and Hamish Milne, later continuing lessons with Alasdair Beatson.

Major prizes followed, among them the 2020 Opus Klassik Award in Germany for Best Young Artist and the Leonard Bernstein Award the next year. Her first Decca album, Romance: The Piano Music of Clara Schumann, appeared in July 2019 and reached No. 1 on the British classical charts. During the 2020 coronavirus lockdown she joined her siblings for a streamed home performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, from Nottingham. That same year she made her Wigmore Hall recital debut with a program devoted to female composers for International Women’s Day and took part in streamed concerto engagements with several leading orchestras. Her second Decca release, Summertime, devoted to Gershwin and additional American composers, followed in summer 2021.

Throughout the 2021–2022 season she appeared as concerto soloist with major ensembles that included the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Dallas Symphony, and the Royal Philharmonic. She also held the Young Artist in Residence post with the Liverpool Philharmonic and undertook a solo recital tour across North America. Frequent duet performances with her younger brother Sheku form part of her schedule, as do chamber-music collaborations with assorted artists. The 2021 cello-and-piano album Muse documented one such partnership with Sheku; the solo collection Childhood Tales appeared the following year. In 2023 she gave her first solo BBC Proms performance, presenting Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 26. The Mendelssohn album, containing music by both Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, was released in 2024.