By the end of Isata Kanneh-Mason’s Australian debut solo recital program, you may feel a sense of a dawn breaking, of a horizon brightening. 

If you do, then the British pianist will consider her performance a job well done.

“I don’t like to impose too much on people’s imagination because I really think a concert is such a unique experience for everyone,” she says. “But I like to think it creates the impression of doors opening … of hope.”

After opening her program with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, Kanneh-Mason plays two pieces by Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova before arriving at Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. The trajectory is a considered one, Kanneh-Mason explains, inspired by one of the Tabakova works, Halo.

“It is literally going from darkness into light as the halo gets brighter. I’ve expanded that so that now the whole program is built around that idea.”

“I like going from the Moonlight into the Gaspard de la nuit as well because the Moonlight is quite dark in the first movement and virtuosic in the last,” she says. “So there’s a nice transition from that into the Gaspard de la nuit as well.”