Fantasie

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason is the fifth of seven prodigiously gifted Kanneh-Mason siblings, and at age 22 became the third to make a solo album. The main item is Chopin’s much-recorded Piano Sonata No. 2, and Kanneh-Mason catches vividly the opening movement’s nervous restlessness, and pinpoints a sense of tottering instability in the succeeding Scherzo. The famous “Funeral March” slow movement has both a dignified poetry and a glowering implacability, with alluringly beautiful playing in the becalmed central section. An appropriately unsettling, flickering finale sets a convincing seal on Kanneh-Mason’s probingly individual interpretation. Her sensitivity is further illustrated in delicately spun accounts of two preludes by Debussy, and in William Grant Still’s brief but beguiling Summerland. Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 closes the recital, once again underlining the freshly insightful nature of Kanneh-Mason’s interpretation, and the poised eloquence of her playing in the burbling, effervescent finale.