Sheku Kanneh-Mason

The British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason can be heard as “artiste étoile” in four concerts at the Lucerne Summer Festival 2024. Born in 1999, he received his first lessons on his instrument at the age of six. He began his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London when he was nine, initially with Ben Davies and subsequently with Hannah Roberts. In 2016, Kanneh-Mason won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award, the first Black musician ever to do so, and launched his meteoric career. In the very next year he was introduced at the BBC Proms, where he has performed every summer since, including as a star guest in 2023 in the globally broadcast Last Night of the Proms. He previously became known to an audience of billions when he played at the wedding of the British Prince Harry to Meghan Markle in 2018. Sheku Kanneh-Mason performs with the world’s leading orchestras, including, in the 2023-24 season, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Orchestre de Paris, San Francisco Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. Together with his sister, the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, he has made guest appearances in Asia and Europe; he has also undertaken a recital tour with the guitarist Plínio Fernandes. His debut CD Inspiration, released in 2018, reached the top spot in the British classical charts, and his recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto conducted by Sir Simon Rattle (2020) also ranked in the UK Top Ten. Most recently, in 2022, he released the album Song featuring works by composers from Bach to Villa-Lobos. He also plays in the family ensemble comprising all seven Kanneh-Mason children and has recorded Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals with them on CD. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award in 2020 and was named to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, teaches as Menuhin Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He plays an instrument made by Matteo Goffriller in 1700.

Lucerne Festival debut on 30 August 2018 as part of the Debut series, in a program of works by Boccherini, Brahms, and Poulenc

April 2024