Recording of the Week, MUSE from Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason

It was around this time last year that Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his pianist sister Isata joined forces on record for the first time, when a family-and-friends recording of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals gave the briefest of glimpses into the special synergy that exists between the two siblings: the pair’s dreamy, unruffled Swan was the real heart-and-soul of the set, and I remembering crossing my fingers that we’d get to hear them in something more substantial in the near future.

Certainly their debut joint album Muse (released today on Decca) is as meaty a programme as one could wish for, with sonatas by Barber and Rachmaninov giving both players a full-body workout and a well-chosen selection of songs by the two composers showcasing that same flowing grace and sense of the musicians breathing as one which made their Swan so special. Aside from the formidable technical demands which they make on both individual musicians, the two sonatas require pin-sharp co-ordination between the players thanks to their many lightning changes of tempo and mood, and it’s evident from the first few minutes that the pair have spent an intensive period of time immersing themselves in this music together: at the end of 2019 they embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of the US with a programme featuring these two works, and continued to explore them further during the long months of lockdown in their family home in Nottingham. (They performed individual movements of the Rachmaninov sonata in four of the informal concerts which they streamed from home while concert-halls remained dark, and both sonatas featured in their superb Proms recital last summer, which was broadcast from a near-empty Royal Albert Hall).

They open with Barber's Sonata from 1932, a piece which is far less well-represented on disc than the Rachmaninov, and (as Sheku pointed out when we spoke about the project last month) far more compact than its earlier counterpart but just as ambitious: whereas Rachmaninov develops his material over the course of half an hour, the 22-year-old Barber crams a welter of ideas into a mere fifteen minutes so that the work is fairly bursting at the seams. The pair embrace its youthful impetuosity with a will, and never sell anything short: right from the opening phrase, which crescendos swiftly into life with the abandon of a new driver stepping boldly on the accelerator, they pace every shift in dynamic and tempo with perfect synchronicity, and revel in the brief stretches where the young composer does build in a bit of breathing-space. The strange second movement – an Adagio and Scherzo rolled into one – is particularly impressive, with no sense of either player being caught off-guard by the sudden scurrying interruptions of the hymn-like melody and not even the merest hint of breathlessness when the music settles back into more contemplative mode on the turn of a dime.

The Rachmaninov sonata proves a wonderful illustration of how these two very different musical personalities complement one another. Isata (a vivid interpreter of the Second Piano Concerto, which dates from the previous year) is the more assertive, extrovert presence throughout, yet she never overwhelms her brother’s predominantly soft-grained sound or pushes the music harder than he feels it should go, particularly in the opening section where his low-key, quietly introspective treatment of the main theme may come as a surprise to anyone accustomed to Rostropovich, Isserlis or Weilerstein. The passages where he’s swept along by her exuberance, though, really do pack a punch, not least at the climaxes of the outer movements where the slap of string on fingerboard and bow on string add to the cumulative impact. And as throughout the programme, there’s a wonderful sense of give-and-take as the players pass musical ideas from hand to hand, with Sheku proving as sensitive an accompanist as his sister in the many moments where the piano takes centre-stage.

All in all, it’s a compelling, truly collaborative debut recital which plays to the siblings’ considerable strengths both as a duo and as individual artists, and I’d love to see what they might do with a programme on similar lines centring on Chopin and Shostakovich…

Look out for our interview with Sheku and Isata about the project in the coming weeks...