Sergio Mims: NYTimes.com: A Brother and Sister Triumph Together at Carnegie Hall

The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his sister, the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, performed on Wednesday at Weill Recital Hall. (Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)

Sergio A. Mims writes:

The New York Times classical music critic Anthony Tommasini gave a rave review to the Dec. 11 Carnegie Hall recital debut of Sheku and Isata Kanneh-mason. Being there myself I can agree with what Tommasini says.   It was one of the finest, most stimulating concerts I've seen in years.

As the NY Times says in it's review  "Mr. Kanneh-Mason is a gifted, sensitive artist. And in the demanding works this duo performed — especially Rachmaninoff’s rhapsodic and teeming Sonata in G Minor, which has a virtuosic piano part — Ms. Kanneh-Mason was a superb collaborator." 

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini

December 12, 2019

In 2016, the British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason won the prestigious BBC Young Musician of the Year Award. Early in 2018, his debut recording on the Decca label was released, including his arrangement of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” which has been streamed more than 11 million times on Spotify.

But this attention paled next to the overnight fame he achieved from a single performance in May 2018, when he played during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, watched on television by an estimated 1.9 billion people.

On Wednesday, things were decidedly more intimate when Mr. Kanneh-Mason, 20, gave his New York recital debut in Carnegie Hall’s 268-seat Weill Recital Hall, alongside his slightly older sister, the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason. (Her own Decca album, of works by Clara Schumann, has just been named to The New York Times’s list of the best classical recordings of the year.)

Mr. Kanneh-Mason is a gifted, sensitive artist. And in the demanding works this duo performed — especially Rachmaninoff’s rhapsodic and teeming Sonata in G Minor, which has a virtuosic piano part — Ms. Kanneh-Mason was a superb collaborator.

The program, available in its entirety at wqxr.org, opened with Beethoven’s 12 Variations on “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” The jaunty theme comes from Papageno’s song in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” in which the rustic bird catcher explains that what he wants most in life is a loving wife. From the first statement of the theme in Beethoven’s jolly arrangement, Mr. Kanneh-Mason brought out the wistful subtext of the music, the yearning and loneliness the character feels, with rich, focused tone and elegant phrasing. As the variations grew in intricacy and inventiveness, these impressive musicians responded with crisp stylishness.