Page 38 - FULL BOOK Isata Kanneh-Mason Childhood Tales

Symphony Orchestra]. It’s very much up and running now, and we go back out there every year
to support them and do concerts.

Isata (back left) with her siblings Sheku, Mariatu, Jeneba, Konya, Aminata and Braimah.

Turning to the works on your new album, when did Dohnányi's Variations on a Nursery
Tune come onto your radar?
I was about twenty and studying for my undergraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music,
and I went to listen to one of the postgraduate students playing it with the Academy orchestra. I
didn’t know anything about the piece, not even its title - I just assumed it was a Dohnányi
concerto. All the way through that dramatic orchestral introduction I was wondering how the
piano would enter…and when it finally did enter [with the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ theme]
the entire audience just burst out laughing! I completely fell in love with the piece and just had to
play it myself – though I quickly discovered that once you’ve got past the opening theme things
do get a lot more difficult…

Recording it with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was a joy, because Domingo
[Hindoyan, their Chief Conductor] is such a wonderful musician. He’s just great to work with,
because he strikes the perfect balance between authority and collaboration: he has such
command of the orchestra and the music, but was also so open to listening to me and taking my
ideas about the piece on board.

Had all of the solo works on the album been with you since childhood?

I learned the Mozart variations when I was twelve, and just last week we dug out an old
recording of me playing them back then! It’s been nice to come back to the piece, because once
you’re a bit older you come to appreciate just how many inventive, intricate things he does with
that most familiar of tunes. There are some variations where the tune is buried deep within the
harmony underneath flurries of semiquavers, then he puts it into a minor key, plays with tempi,
transfers the tune to the left hand with arpeggios in the right…I used to feel like he did