, conducted by Music Director Jaime Martín at Royce Hall.){kind=link}
[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts review of Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s performance of at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO), conducted by Music Director Jaime Martín at Royce Hall.
For my first time attending a concert at UCLA’s iconic Royce Hall, I really could not have asked for a more magical night. Even in the pouring rain. Perhaps the melancholy skies added to the evening’s incredible atmosphere and to the profound music of Joseph Haydn.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is a virtuoso cellist. A worldwide phenomenon, he became more widely known after his performance at the royal wedding of Harry and Megan. He’s now everywhere, literally. After a glance at his exhausting schedule, flitting from the UK to the USA and back again, then to Ireland, Australia, Brazil, Canada, all within weeks…how he maintains this pace is anyone’s guess, but he clearly has a drive that most of us pray for. Not only performing all over the world, but holding workshops in between his performances with orchestras such as the Philharmonia, London Mozart Players, the Orchestre De Chambre De Paris and on and on, the list seemingly endless.
To hear him play is something I will never forget, such is his mastery of this most melancholy of instruments. I always hear a human voice in the cello, full of the same heat, passion and frailty that we all possess.
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, led by their wonderful conductor Jaime Martin, enveloped him in the warm embrace of Haydn’s glorious music. And I felt as if the ceiling of the hall might float away. Sheku is a really spectacular and intensely moving musician to see play live. He watches closely everyone around him playing their parts, as he waits blissfully to join them. Some soloists seem to play apart from those around them, lost in their own music perhaps. But Sheku seems to become a part of every note played, by him and by every other musician. He connects with them all in such a beautiful, graceful and joyful way, in love with the music and in love with the moment.
This concert was beyond magical to witness. In the audience, I felt transported, as if we were all on stage with him. As if we played as important a role in this beautiful exchange of music and appreciation as Sheku and the orchestra.
In these long barren years of disconnection and anxiety, we need to feel a part of our world, now smaller than ever. Music can do this, and art of all kinds too. But live performances, and especially masters such as Sheku and LACO, can heal us. And in the all too short time spent with them, on a rainy night in L.A., in the cathedral-like Royce Hall, I felt deeply and gratefully healed.