To music-lovers the name Kanneh-Mason describes a whole family of prodigiously gifted musicians. The pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, who sparkles on her recent acclaimed Children’s Corner album, and the feted young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a world-renowned recitalist since wining the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition, are so far the most notable of this extraordinary family.
This made it something of a coup for Music for Galway to entice them, together, to make their Irish debut here in Galway. Arriving a little early for the May 2024 Cellissimo festival (to which this concert was a billed as prequel ), the pair left to whoops and cheers after displaying vividly the give and take of fine chamber playing, in a well-chosen programme featuring relatively unfamiliar pieces from Bridge, Chopin, and Rachmaninov.
Drawing large crowds to the unaccustomed setting of Galmont Hotel’s large ballroom, for this concert there was real expectancy. Just as well, for it began a quarter of an hour late, as through blustery weather the audience took a while to decamp from parking their cars. A damp full house provided the players with rather a damp acoustic and it took a little time for audience and musicians to adjust. When they did, shining through the gloom could be discerned the simmering, piercing playing of exceptional players evidently used to living and breathing music together.
Taught by the Irishman Charles Villiers Standford at the Royal College of Music, Frank Bridge is well-known to string players for providing some of the most singing lines in early twentieth-century music. Like his teacher he had a gift for adapting folk songs into chamber pieces. But unlike his teacher this intimacy with pentatonic melody and open tonalities would drag his musical language closer to modernism.
Important in this change was the First World War: facing the loss of so many friends and colleagues, many of them musicians, confirmed Bridge as a quiet but determined pacifist.
Power of the cello
Interestingly, this depth of feeling about the war became often best expressed in cello music. His brief Lament for string orchestra (in honour of Catherine, a young girl who died aged nine on the Lusitania ) features cello lines prominently in closing. And although initially he found it hard to get a performance, his Oration (1930 ) for cello and orchestra is one of the most moving musical reactions to the war.
Premiered by Felix Salmond in 1917, Bridge’s Cello Sonata in D minor presents a more immediate response to world events, and at first seemed more elegiac than modernist. Yet after Sheku Kanneh-Mason delivered the dignified opening melody the ear became attuned to less comforting sounds.
The piano part, played so expressively by his sister Isata, opened up new complexities in tonality, echoed by bursts from the cello, even before the long second movement conspicuously varied its rhythm and cadences in a sequence of rhetorical laments.
Both musicians were equal partners in a dialogue which left behind open fifths for more wrought passages and uneasy reflections before finally reaching the harmonious close. Played like this, it is a piece which plainly deserves many more performances than it gets.
Adding to this sense of struggle overcome, Chopin’s only Cello Sonata seems to have been unusually difficult for the composer to write. He was evidently attempting not the ornamented dancing piano music for which he had become known but something he considered more serious and lasting – to his dissatisfaction, as when his final illness was taking hold, the music took some time and trouble to progress.
Sometimes this strain was audible in the direction of the piece, whose traditional G-minor basis permitted noises nicely suited to the way the cello is strung, if not always a consistent mood. In this performance however its moments of light and colour were beautifully illuminated by fingerboard flourishes and pianistic decorations, while still preserving the music’s sombre underlying roots.
The sense of a serious musical partnership developing only increased after the interval.
For his G-minor Cello Sonata Rachmaninov was determined that the piano player should act as a pianist, not just as accompanist to the cello. That the two instrumentalists should be equal participants in making sound fitted this duo perfectly. They gave a commanding performance of a difficult piece.
Maybe at moments in this unfitting acoustic space the cello in the upper register became a touch overwrought, suggesting a slightly effortful production of sound against the bright piano resonance. Yet the achingly rich deeper tones exhibited a magnificent sonorous power, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s certainty in tricky double-stopping passages and confident supple lines confirmed his rare talent, matched by the energized rhythms and sensitive placement of Isata Kanneh-Mason’s powerful pianism.
On stage together the two have an unmatched presence. They play as if they are making music as in their living room, watching and anticipating each other’s musical movements. This intimacy also communicates directly to the audience. They responded to the affirming shouts and inevitable standing ovation with a brief lyrical encore.
For those hunting more cello music, Music for Galway’s Cellissimo concert series returns in May. It features the number six: there are for instance the six Bach Suites for Cello, six new pieces by Irish composers, six repeat performances around the county, and so on. For this historic curtain-raiser the Kanneh-Mason duo were anything but at sixes and sevens. They deserved more like tens across the board, bringing to Galway a rare example of music-making and familial harmony.
