How do you plan a recital tour more than a year in advance and somehow find a way to make it all seem like it was planned to not just offer great music, but perhaps commentary on the precise moment of time we are living in? That was just one of the questions I asked siblings Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason before embarking on their US/Canada tour that begins on April 19th and continues through May 8th.
Sheku is a cellist and his sister Isata plays the piano. This tour will find them performing works by Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten and Dimitri Shostakovich at all of their performances. Either a work by Karen Katchaturian or Beethoven will be the other piece performed on the program depending on the city in which you see them. Their tour begins in Santa Barbara on April 19th and continues to Walt Disney Concert Hall on April 20th. You can see the full itinerary here.
I spoke via Zoom with the Kanneh-Mason siblings last month. You can see the full interview on our YouTube channel. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Shostakovich, whose Sonata in D Minor you are performing on this tour, said “Real music is always revolutionary for it cements the ranks of the people; it arouses them and leads them onward.” Do you agree with Shostakovich and, if so, do you see yourselves as revolutionaries arousing audiences and leading them forward?
Sheku: I think it’s a fantastic quote from a composer I’ve always really admired. I think as performers it’s a wonderfully powerful position to be in. We have spent lots of time thinking about that music that we’re playing and the emotions in the stories and things that we can convey; to have an audience of people in the room and to be able to show these thoughts and dealings with them and hopefully inspire them or move them to feel or to provide them with an escape from what’s going on outside in their lives.
Q: When you’re putting a recital tour together, what are your priorities in terms of how you program that tour?
Isata: It usually is based on pieces that we loved at that time, that we feel inspired to learn and then also pieces that we think would be great for audiences to hear. Many of the pieces in this program are often not played – the Bridge and Britten, in particular, are not played much outside of the UK. We think they’re wonderful pieces and were very inspired to learn them and play them.
Q: The Frank Bridge Sonata in D Minor for Cello and Piano was written at a time when he was very concerned about what was going on in the world because that was written around the time of the first world war. There’s no way you either of you could have known what was going to be going on in the world when you went on tour. Given Bridge’s concerns and even Shostakovich’s history of commenting on the Soviet government, do you think that now, given everything that’s going on in Ukraine, that this music allows you to also make some commentary on what’s going on now beyond what your original intention was with these pieces?
Sheku: I think, of course, yeah. Frank Bridge wrote this music in relation to what he was thinking and feeling at that time, but I don’t think he wrote it solely for that time. But also I think as humans we have gone through many different times and lots of events. But I find when I look back in history we haven’t changed so much in the way that we relate to each other. So I think music written 100 years ago is still at the core very relevant now and probably will always be in some way. And I find playing the Bridge Sonata very powerful at this time. Of course, it wasn’t written in relation to anything that’s going on at this moment, but it doesn’t mean that it can’t move us and move us to think about that.
Q: Isata you said previously that when you record a piece it’s a portrait of how you how you play it now and how you both play it now. You go on to talk about how that perspective might change in five, ten or twenty years. I’m wondering how much does your perspective change over the course of a tour between when you first start performing it and when you give your last performance as part of that recital tour?
Isata: That’s also a really good question. I don’t know if we have a massive perspective shift on the pieces in the space of a tour, but I think they become more spontaneous. I think you get more …
Sheku: Confident…
Isata: It’s the confidence.
Sheku: …if the first ones go well.
Q: Historically how do you find your your relationships with the material you’ve chosen to perform change over the course of even a small tour like this?
Sheku: The most enjoyable thing about what we do is investigating music often that has so many layers and so much to investigate in so little time in our short lives. So I think it’s a constant journey and a constant development. Often the perspective of a piece can change based on stepping back and looking at it from farther away. It’s always a very intense relationship with a piece of music and I find that to be very special.
Q: Clara Schumann, in discussing composing, said, “There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creating, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.” That seems like it could easily apply the two of you when you are performing.
Isata: When you’re playing or rehearsing chamber music and you’re really into something you really can lose yourself for a few hours. And I also felt that watching a concert as well. I think that is the wonderful thing about music and that’s kind of the experience you want to give audiences as well when you’re giving a concert. That’s definitely the idea.
Q: If you both were to look forward twenty-five years, where would you like your careers to be?
Isata: I would like to have lots of recordings of the kind of repertoire that I love doing and also new interesting repertoire I’ve played. I love doing chamber music, so I think the same with Sheku. We really want to look back and feel like [we’ve] had a fulfilling career when you’ve kind of done many of the things that you like to do.
Sheku: I haven’t even been alive 25 years, so I don’t know what that feels like. But I would say I hope to be performing. I hope to have a fairly big list of works that have been written for me. That’s something I’m very keen on doing and I hope to be able to look back and say that I’ve explored, to the best of my ability, everything that was possible to explore in terms of styles of music, people to collaborate with, the repertoire and that I explored it to the maximum.
Be sure to check back with Cultural Attaché for more interviews with the leading artists in the performing arts and also for our weekly Best Bets.
Main Photo: Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason (Courtesy Universal Music Group)
