WPR Music new album of the week: ‘Jane Austen’s Piano’

This week’s new classical album should be a treat for literature lovers. To celebrate the 250th birthday of author Jane Austen, it transports listeners back to her world, presenting music that she would have known and possibly even played.

“Jane Austen’s Piano” is the newest release from British pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, one of the seven talented Kanneh-Mason siblings, as a follow up to her debut solo album released earlier last year.

Like many women of her social class in late eighteenth-century England, Austen learned the piano from an early age. And while many of her letters and other personal reminiscences have been lost over the years, her family’s piano books still survive, and even include pieces copied out in Austen’s own handwriting.

This new EP from Jeneba Kanneh-Mason includes a few of those works, plus music mentioned in or inspired by Jane Austen’s six novels. 

One of the pieces on this EP that Austen transcribed herself is the “Piano Sonata in C major” by Joseph Haydn. Haydn wrote this sonata in the early 1780s, while he was still serving as the Kappellmeister to the Esterhazy family in Austria, but it became hugely popular in England after Haydn’s first trip to London in 1792, when Austen was just 16 years old.

Alongside shorter pieces by George Frideric Handel and Johann Baptiste Cramer, this new collection also includes a set of variations on the Irish folk song “Robin Adair” by English violinist and composer George Kiallmark (1781-1835). This piece is notable not only because it appears in the Austen family music books, but also because Austen herself mentioned it by name in her 1816 novel “Emma.”

Rounding out the EP is a highlight from the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” by composer Dario Marianelli.

“Jane Austen’s Piano” is available now on the Sony label, wherever you stream or download music.