Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Windsor Castle in May 2018. St George's Chapel, where English monarchs have worshipped and been buried since the fourteenth century, was full of the two thousand people who had been invited to witness the wedding of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan Markle. The television cameras that covered the ceremony broadcast to an estimated two billion viewers across the world. In the middle of this most scrutinized of occasions — scrutinized for its fashion, its politics, its cultural symbolism, its extraordinary departure from the conventions of previous royal weddings — a nineteen-year-old cellist from Nottingham stood up and played. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, born April 4, 1999, the third of seven siblings in one of the most musically gifted families Britain has produced in a generation, performed three pieces during the signing of the register: Schubert's Ave Maria, a traditional spiritual, and his own arrangement of Ben E. King's Stand By Me. The sound of his cello in the vaulted stone chapel, broadcast to two billion people in real time, introduced classical music to an audience it had not previously reached and introduced Sheku Kanneh-Mason to the world.

The family context is essential to understanding Sheku Kanneh-Mason. He is the third child of Stuart Kanneh-Mason and Kadiatu Kanneh, both professional people with no formal musical training, who raised seven children in Nottingham in a household that became, through some combination of genes, environment, and the almost incomprehensible commitment of two parents, one of the most productive musical nurseries in British history. All seven children — Isata, Braimah, Sheku, Konya, Jeneba, Aminata, and Mariatu — play classical instruments at the highest level. The elder siblings have careers as professional musicians. The family regularly performs together in concerts and recordings that have attracted national and international attention. The household in which Sheku grew up was not, by any ordinary measure, a typical musical family. It was something closer to a phenomenon — a convergence of gifts and dedication that has no easy parallel in contemporary British musical life.

Sheku began cello at age six, studying at the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, travelling from Nottingham for lessons in the pattern familiar to British prodigy musicians whose gifts outstrip what their local areas can offer. His progress was rapid: by his early teens, he was performing at a level that attracted notice from the most discerning pedagogues in the country, and his acceptance to the Junior Guildhall as a full scholarship student confirmed what his teachers had been saying privately for years. He studied with Hannah Roberts, and later with other distinguished teachers, developing a sound — warm, full-bodied, technically assured, emotionally direct — that marked him as a cellist of genuine potential.

In 2016, Sheku Kanneh-Mason entered the BBC Young Musician competition at the age of sixteen. The competition — which had been identifying exceptional young British instrumentalists since 1978 and whose alumni include some of the finest musicians Britain has produced in the past half-century — presented him with a platform. He played Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in the final, a work of considerable technical and emotional complexity, and he played it with the combination of physical assurance and musical intelligence that the competition's judges, who had heard hundreds of talented young players, recognized as exceptional. He won. He became only the second cellist in the competition's history to take first prize, and he was the youngest person to win the competition in over two decades. The BBC broadcast the final to its national audience, and the response — the combination of his playing, his evident calm, and his remarkable background — was immediate and enthusiastic.

His signing with Decca Classics followed quickly. His debut recording, released in 2018, included works across a wide range of the cello repertoire — Shostakovich's Concerto, Fauré, Errollyn Wallen, Bob Marley in arrangement — and it reached the top of the UK classical charts, a position that classical albums rarely achieve and which reflected both the quality of the recording and the scale of public interest in its performer. The diversity of the repertoire on that first recording was itself a statement: Kanneh-Mason, like the family he comes from, is interested in what music can do across boundaries of genre and tradition, not merely within the conventions of the classical concert hall. The Bob Marley arrangement — played with the warmth and directness that characterizes all his playing — attracted particular attention as a gesture of cultural connection.

His subsequent recordings and concerts have confirmed the promise of the debut. His playing of the Elgar Cello Concerto — the piece that haunts the British cello tradition, the piece associated above all others with Jacqueline du Pré — has been praised for bringing freshness and emotional honesty to a work whose recorded history is so rich that it is difficult to add to without either imitation or deliberate departure. Kanneh-Mason does neither: he plays it as himself, which turns out to be enough. His performances with the world's major orchestras, his BBC Proms appearances, and his chamber music work — often with members of his own family — have accumulated a performing record of remarkable breadth and seriousness for a musician still in his early twenties.

He has also been conspicuous, in a way that reflects both his own values and the political moment of his career, in his advocacy for access to music education. He grew up attending a state school — not the fee-paying schools that have historically dominated British musical achievement — and he has spoken publicly and repeatedly about the importance of school music programs, of instrumental tuition for children from all backgrounds, and of the role that music education plays in the kind of family that produced him and his siblings. The advocacy is not abstract. He is living proof of what music education can produce when it finds the right children. He has made it his business to make the case that there are more of them than the classical music world has yet found.