Music |
Sheku Kanneh-Mason: Inspiration
By
Published: May 19, 2018
Category:
Classical
Sheku Kanneh-Mason was scheduled to perform with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in the last concert of its 50th anniversary season. Then he got a call from Meghan Markle. His schedule instantly changed. At the Royal Wedding, he played three songs. His performance was seen around the world by as many as 2 billion people. He killed. And… oh… he’s 19.
This wasn’t a small moment for a kid who was born in 1999. But it was far from his first major triumph. In 2016, when he won the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year award, he was the first black musician to win since its launch 38 years earlier. In 2015, with his siblings, he competed on “Britain’s Got Talent.” He called that “a good experience for getting used to performing in front of lots of people, with cameras and interviews. When it came to BBC Young Musician, there were fewer cameras so I wasn’t fazed at all.”
He’s unfazed for good reason. Most of the seven children in his family play music, and not casually. “I go in my bedroom, my brother goes in his bedroom, and then the girls fight over the pianos,” he says. That commitment starts, of course, with his parents. “Every penny of our money goes on music,” his mother says. “We haven’t decorated for years. The tiles are coming off the roof. We never buy new clothes. I do the girls’ hair myself because it’s too expensive to take them to a salon. Our car is a wreck.”
The press makes a big deal of his race. His father’s family is originally from Antigua, his mother’s family is from Sierra Leone and Wales. Sheku simplifies his status: “I’m Welsh.” The rest is noise: “If a lot of people see a young black guy from a comprehensive school playing classical music, they’ll think that’s quite cool. My job is to just do a good performance.”
His first CD, “Inspiration, was recently released. It zoomed to number one on the UK classical albums chart; in February, it had been streamed 2.5 million times on Spotify; that number will now increase exponentially. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
The CD is mostly classical… with exceptions.
Here Sheku plays Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”
And the Leonard Cohen standard, “Hallelujah.”
His greatest hit — his prize-winner – is the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No 1.
“It’s Shostakovich’s last battle against the Russian regime, and there are bits of anger, despair and loneliness – especially in the second movement,” he says. “I often think there are bits of sarcasm and humour in it, too, and places where he’s taking the mick, especially in the last movement.”
Nineteen years old.
