Isata Kanneh-Mason Performs on NPR’s Tiny Desk Series

Isata Kanneh-Mason is the latest artist to perform from behind NPR’s iconic Tiny Desk. The British pianist played three of her favorite pieces.

Kanneh-Mason began her set by tackling the ambitious finale to Frédéric Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata. Afterwards, Kanneh-Mason explained why she picked Chopin, saying “He was a composer that I always played as a child, he was one of the first composers that I learnt, so it’s always a pleasure to come back to him throughout life.” Kanneh-Mason followed her impressive performance with Franz Liszt’s: Consolation No. 3 in D-flat major.

The pianist closes with an arrangement of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The Black British composer, who died young in 1912, has a special significance for Kanneh-Mason. Coleridge-Taylor’s father hailed from Sierra Leone, the birthplace of Kanneh-Mason’s mother. “Growing up, I never really saw any Black composers within the classical music field,” Kanneh-Mason explains. She previously performed Coleridge-Taylor’s music on her 2021 album Summertime, which featured renditions of works by American classical composers, as well as spirituals by Coleridge-Taylor.

In 2023, Kanneh-Mason released an album called Childhood Tales, which featured four pieces by Mozart, Dohnányi, Debussy, and Schumann. “The pieces in this album carry with them a certain nostalgia, and I feel almost a sense of longing for childhood in some of them,” she said. “That wistfulness for childhood is something that I wanted to express, as I think it’s a time when one’s love of music is at its most uncomplicated.”

Kanneh-Mason is the eldest of seven classically-trained children. In 2021, she and her sibling Sheku, a renowned cellist, released Muse, their first album as a duo.

Kanneh-Mason’s 2019 debut, Romance, topped the UK Official Classical Artist chart. The album was a portrait of the life of composer and pianist Clara Schumann.

Listen to Muse now.