Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Sheku Kanneh-Mason: The Cellist Who Moved the Charts

On 19 May 2018, an estimated global audience of many millions watched a nineteen-year-old from Nottingham play the cello at St George's Chapel, Windsor, during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He had learned of the invitation by telephone. "I was bowled over when Ms Markle called me to ask if I would play during the ceremony," he posted afterward, "and of course I immediately said yes!!! What a privilege. I can't wait!" Two years later his Elgar album entered the UK chart at number eight — the first time a cellist had ever reached the Top 10.

Nottingham, Third of Seven

Sheku Kanneh-Mason was born on 4 April 1999 in Bahrain and raised in Nottingham, the third of seven children. His father, Stuart Mason, is a London-born hotel business manager of Antiguan descent; his mother, Dr Kadiatu Kanneh, was born in Sierra Leone and worked as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham before becoming an author. All seven children play.

He came to the cello at six, after a brief detour on the violin, studying with Sarah Huson-Whyte. The decision was made by watching: he saw his sister perform at Stringwise, an annual youth string course, and wanted what she had. At nine he passed his Grade 8 cello examination with the highest marks in the United Kingdom and won the Marguerite Swan Memorial Prize.

That same year an ABRSM junior scholarship took him to the Junior Academy at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was taught by Ben Davies; he later studied at the Academy proper under Hannah Roberts. He took A-levels in music, mathematics and physics at Trinity School, Nottingham. He names Jacqueline du Pré and Mstislav Rostropovich as influences, and also Bob Marley; he listens to jazz, to hip-hop of the 1990s and early 2000s, and to Brazilian music.

Two Kinds of Television

In 2015 the siblings appeared on *Britain's Got Talent* as The Kanneh-Masons. He has been unsentimental about what that was for: it was "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."

In May 2016 he won BBC Young Musician, playing Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto — the first Black musician to win in the competition's history, which began in 1978. Management followed in June, along with the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Instrumentalist Duet Prize, and in November he signed with Decca Classics.

The Commercial Anomaly

What happened to his recordings has no real precedent in modern classical music. His debut album *Inspiration*, released on 26 January 2018, entered the UK Albums Chart at number eighteen, topped the classical chart, drew 2.5 million Spotify streams and became the biggest-selling British debut album of the year; he was the youngest cellist to break into the Top 20 with a debut. *Elgar*, released on 10 January 2020, reached number eight — the first cellist ever in the Top 10, and the first classical musician there in more than thirty years. *Muse*, with his sister Isata, followed in November 2021.

Honours, and a 1700 Goffriller

He played the British Academy Film Awards in February 2017 and again in February 2018, becoming the first artist invited back a second time, and appeared at the Royal Variety Performance in November 2018. The Classic BRIT Awards gave him both Male Artist of the Year and the Critics' Choice Award in 2018. He was appointed MBE in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to music and won the public vote for Best Classical Artist at the Global Awards that March. He plays a Matteo Goffriller cello made in 1700.

The Argument He Keeps Making

Kanneh-Mason has used his platform with unusual precision. On the perennial charge against his art form, he draws a sharp distinction: "Classical music isn't elitist – the problem is it's expensive." On performing with the Chineke! Orchestra, Europe's first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, at the BBC Proms in 2017, he told the Guardian's Tom Service: "Chineke! is a really inspiring project. I rarely go to a concert and see that kind of diversity in the orchestra. Or in the audience. Having the orchestra will definitely change the culture. It's so important we're celebrating music by black composers, too." Asked on *Desert Island Discs* about the Last Night of the Proms tradition, he observed simply that "Rule, Britannia! makes people uncomfortable."

He donated £3,000 to Trinity School in January 2018 to fund cello lessons, and became a global ambassador for JDRF in September 2018, having been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at twelve. He is an ambassador for Music Masters and Future Talent and supports Black Lives in Music.

Why Sheku Is Called a Genius

This is the case that requires the most care, because the honest answer is that the word is not well supported. No critic, conductor or teacher is on record calling Kanneh-Mason a genius, and his own instincts run against the idea — he explains his composure at BBC Young Musician not by temperament but by prior exposure to television cameras.

What he demonstrably possesses is craft plus an unusual communicative directness. The craft is real and measurable: Grade 8 at nine with the highest marks in the country, a Shostakovich concerto delivered under competition pressure at seventeen, a decade at the Royal Academy under serious teachers. The rarer quality is what happens when non-specialists hear him. Two and a half million streams of a debut classical record, and a cello album in the pop Top 10 for the first time in the format's history, are not explained by marketing alone; something in the playing reaches listeners with no training to appreciate it.

But it should be said plainly that his historic significance is sociological rather than intellectual. Being the first Black winner of BBC Young Musician in nearly four decades changed who believes the instrument belongs to them, and that matters enormously — while telling us nothing about cognition. If there is genius here, it is a genius for legibility: the ability to make an art form thought forbidding sound obvious, combined with the clarity to explain, correctly, that the barrier was never elitism but money.

Legacy

In May 2022 the Royal Academy of Music appointed him Menuhin Visiting Professor of Performance Mentoring — a teaching role at twenty-three. He played the Last Night of the Proms in September 2023 alongside soprano Lise Davidsen under Marin Alsop, and published *The Power of Music* in 2025. That November he cancelled engagements after an injury to a finger on his left hand, the first serious interruption of a career that had run without pause since he was seventeen. The family that produced him has become a British institution; the argument he made about cost rather than class is now the standard one.