How refreshing when a cellist doesn’t bang around on the instrument, doesn’t grunt in the low register and screech in the high register! In other words, his playing is not based on “his own human difficulties”, as the legendary cello master Janos Starker said sarcastically, when groaning, moaning and with technical toil did not reach the goal of the music.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is the complete opposite of this: the elasticity of his bow technique is phenomenal, the relationship between bow pressure and pull is admirable, the knowledge and feeling for the right bow speed is astounding. The slender, not very large, but intense tone, even in fortissimo, never coarse or even vulgar, enchanted by gentle singing, tenoral density and springy power. Vibrato is not a jelly for all occasions here, but serves to intensify according to the respective music. The fact that there was cheering in the Prinzregententheater has to do not only with the wonderful skills of the cellist but also with the no less fabulous talents of Isata Kanneh-Mason on the piano, who also does nothing that could distract from the music.
The siblings play from a symphonic spirit, so that the fundamentally different sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven (op. 102.1) by the British Frank Bridge (composed between 1913 and 1917) by the Armenian Karen Khatchaturian, nephew of the famous Aram (composed in 1966) and by Dmitri Shostakovich emerged immediately. Beethoven’s sudden beauty of singing against rhythmic fury hit the two of them as directly as they realized the late romantic effervescence and impressionistic phases in Bridge. Khatchaturian’s large-scale, expressive piece filled her with energy and passion. And they championed Shostakovich’s bitter wit, melancholy and virtuoso aggressiveness so unequivocally that after the wild second movement the hall immediately roared. Ovations, two encores from the International Songbook.