I found myself sitting among cello mums and their children, older students, and a scattering of curious music lovers — all drawn by the chance to observe this young star of the English classical scene. What unfolded was quietly moving: an evening shaped by Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s intuitive, deeply felt approach to understanding and making music.
There have always been classical musicians who manage to straddle popular appeal and the classical establishment. Sheku Kanneh-Mason first came to wider attention in 2015 when he and his family reached the semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent. The following year he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. It’s easy to get a little distracted by the wholesome image of the Kanneh-Mason family, yet he is here on tour in Australia because he delivers the core classical repertoire at a very high level.
His presence as a Black musician has also brought sharper focus to the question of who gets to perform and be seen on the classical stage. Kanneh-Mason himself received excellent teaching through institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, while still attending a state school. He has become a strong advocate for music education in schools, and his appearance at Tuesday night’s masterclass felt very much of a piece with that commitment — an evening shaped by his belief that classical music should be accessible to students and to the wider public.
The masterclass formed part of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s Fellows Program. Now in its twenty-fifth year, the Fellowship is one of Australia’s most important professional development pathways for emerging orchestral musicians, offering a structured bridge between tertiary study and a full-time career.
Three musicians were each given around thirty minutes to workshop a piece with Sheku. Noah Lawrence (Cello), part of the Fellows, workshopped the first movement from Schumann’s Cello Concerto. Rio Kawaguchi (Double Bass) is also a Fellow and performed Prelude from Bach Cello Suite No. 2. Andy Lin (Cello), a student from the Sydney Conservatorium, performed the first movement from the Dvořák Cello Concerto. The piano accompanist was Vatche Jambazian, whom I have previously heard playing with the Omega Ensemble.
Sheku’s appearance on stage was understated. The way he walked on suggested he was here to work rather than to perform, softly spoken and perhaps a little overwhelmed by the attention. He brought his own instrument — a c.1700 Matteo Goffriller cello that the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins described as “his silent twin.”
Through his feedback he kept returning to the problem of how to release the grip of technical anxiety about getting all the notes right. We watched as he picked up the instrument to demonstrate that you need to “look up” — not simply to smile at the audience, but to listen to how the notes actually sound. Curling too much over the cello, he suggested, ‘stops the ears from working so well’. The sitting body is not meant to be static, moments of opening up allow something freer to enter the expression of the music. When he was working on the Bach, he played the bass line himself, giving us a brief taste of the warm tone of this very old and valuable instrument.
At times Sheku would sing short phrases to demonstrate the emotional expression in the music. I was reminded of something Simone Young said about the pianist Javier Perianes — that he “thinks in phrases.” This is, of course, a very conventional teaching technique for showing the musical shape of a line. Yet for me as a listener it offered a clear glimpse of the “how” of a musical phrase: how it breathes, the rise and fall of the line, where the energy gathers and where it releases. His singing showed how closely he stays to the feeling of the music itself.
I felt for the musicians who had been focusing so carefully on the demands of memorising and playing the pieces accurately, only to encounter Sheku’s very different process — one that looks for patterns and possibilities rather than fixed solutions. There was something energising about the way he treated interpretation as something that keeps changing and evolving. He encouraged the players to keep exploring different ways of articulating the music, including drawing on nature as a source of inspiration. I scribbled down in my notes his advice to listen closely to the sound forms at the seashore.
In the end, it was less a demonstration of how to play the cello than a quiet invitation to keep listening, and to keep discovering.
Sydney Symphony Fellows Sydney Opera House, 28 July 2026
