The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, 23, is the third of seven siblings – Isata, Braimah, Konya, Jeneba, Aminata, Mariatu, aged 26 to 13 years – all musicians who regularly perform together. He grew up in Nottingham and won BBC Young Musician 2016, which catapulted him to worldwide fame and an invitation to perform at the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle in 2018, watched by an estimated two billion people. He has featured on the cover of GQ magazine, won two Classical Brit awards and in 2020 was awarded an MBE. His recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra (2020) made history as Kanneh-Mason became the first cellist to reach the UK Official Albums Chart Top 10.
He has just been appointed the first Menuhin Visiting Professor of Performance Mentoring at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he was a student. His new solo album, Song, is out on Decca this Friday. On Saturday he will play Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s version of the traditional spiritual Deep River (also recorded by his sister Isata on her solo piano album Summertime) at the Last Night of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, which is live on Radio 3 and across BBC One and BBC Two.
