Isata Kanneh-Mason: Music for Midnight

For Isata Kanneh-Mason, music sounds different at nighttime. “Growing up, I always loved listening to music in bed at night,” she tells Apple Music. “I found the music more captivating and emotional at that time.” This is a fitting playlist, then, in which Kanneh-Mason has assembled a selection of music that she says is “more powerful if listened to at the dead of night”. Unsurprisingly, piano pieces feature prominently, including the Chopin Nocturne No. 13 in C Minor, Op. 48 played by the great Claudio Arrau, and the beautiful “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”) from Schumann’s Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”). There’s also Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, a piece that inspired Kanneh-Mason to want to become a pianist in the first place. Away from the piano, there’s symphonic music for late-night listening. “All of my playlist pieces, including the “Humming Chorus” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Schubert’s Trout Quintet, have been important to me at one stage of my life or another,“ adds Kanneh-Mason. ”They’ve helped me get through a certain time or been really special for me.”