It takes big personality to fill even an intimate recital hall with the sound of a single stringed instrument. Sheku Kanneh-Mason – the star cellist and member of a preternaturally gifted musical family – exuded acres of charisma in his solo debut with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Perelman Theater. With a generous program that spanned centuries and over two hours of music-making, he reveled in the creative possibilities available to his instrument, with a striking intelligence wedded to a rock-solid technique.
Kanneh-Mason occasionally spoke to the audience between movements, though his lilting voice rarely rose above a whisper. In those moments, it was easy to remember that he is only 24 years old. But when he sat down and summoned an amber-hued tone from his Matteo Goffriller 1700 cello, a listener could sense that he was communicating with his true voice. With JS Bach’s Cello Suite no. 2 in D minor, he offered a lesson in freshening up the most familiar music, his sound ranging from rich and vibrato-laden in the Prélude to tense and thready in the Gigue. The two Menuetts were a study in contrasts: the first speedy and impish, the second mournful and thickly textured. The Courante ambled along as it should, but not at the expense of precise intonation. Taken as a whole, the performance made a great case for luxuriating in the standard repertory.
Britten’s Cello Suite no. 1 provided less immediate pleasure – it’s a work that sounds arch one moment, academic the next. Kanneh-Mason’s interpretation did not entirely overcome the peculiarities of the piece, which was written for Mstislav Rostropovich, a specialist in giving voice to tortured psyches. He performed it with nary a hair out of place, moving effortlessly between elegantly bowed passages and agitated pizzicato, but the overall impact lacked a through-line for the audience to latch onto. In terms of the recognizable, Kanneh-Mason seemed more comfortable overall with the warm, Mediterranean rhythms of Gaspar Cassadó’s Suite for Solo Cello, which sounded a bit like Bach with a suntan.
Kanneh-Mason balanced the war horses with three new pieces, all composed since 2020, written expressly with his gifts in mind. He summoned a dizzying array of notes from thin air in Gwilym Simcock’s Prayer for the Senses, using the registers of his cello to produce a striking sense of counterpoint. He dispatched the tango-like melodies of Leo Brouwer’s Cello Sonata no. 2 with quick-fingered dexterity. Five Preludes by Edmund Finnis, a commission of the Royal Academy of Music’s 200 Pieces series, conveyed a range of emotions and musical styles, from rustic energy in the first movement to hazy calm in the last. In fewer than ten minutes, Kanneh-Mason traversed the full range of his instrument, finding especial pleasure in the deep, low notes of the fourth prelude.