Music

RSNO/Chan/Kanneh-Mason

Keith Bruce

five stars

IN the tale of two families, it has been the best of times, it has been the worst of times.

Since 2016 BBC Young Musician winner Sheku Kanneh-Mason played in the chapel of Windsor Castle at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the young cellist has forged a path for his siblings to prominence as classical musicians, including a chart-topping new version of Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals recorded as a family.

For the Mountbatten-Windsor clan, the years since that ceremony in May 2018 have been less harmonious. For the time being, that gig for the Royals still merits a prominent mention in the 23-year-old’s publicity, but it will surely be less significant as his musical achievements accumulate.

The latest of these is the performance of the enormously challenging Cello Concerto No 2 in G Minor by Dmitri Shostakovich. Less heard than the more muscular First Concerto, which was in part a celebration of the death of Stalin, it was also written for Russian virtuoso Mstislav Rostopovich and was premiered in Moscow in 1966.

The RSNO under Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan preceded it with a work from the same year by Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz, so the first half of Saturday’s concert was the dark, brooding sound of dissent from behind the Iron Curtain, an unambiguous riposte to those calling for a purging of all Russian repertoire from concerts in support of the people of Ukraine.

From the exposed solo opening bars of the concerto, underlined first by the lower strings and then a dark-hued combination of wind instruments, many minutes pass before any shafts of light appear in the score. The young cellist is as intense as ever, but now a more relaxed and confident performer, the score in front of him but only sparingly consulted.

Requiring a wide range of techniques, with big pizzicato chords, double-stopping and bow-hair shedding power, it is a hugely demanding work that Kanneh-Mason performed with authority and even playfulness later on. The later movements are no less virtuosic – for the RSNO’s horn players as well as the soloist – and employ a huge range of orchestral voices, moving from militaristic side-drum to lyrical flute and harp, with an emotional cadenza from the cellist in between.

The glimmer of hope that the listener might choose to hear in the work’s querulous ending was given full voice in the second half from even younger talent when the RSNO Junior Chorus made its post-pandemic return to the main stage with Faure’s Requiem.

Although a choral favourite, full of gorgeous melody and harmony, opportunities to hear it sung with a full orchestra are relatively rare, and the colours of the strings before the Agnus Dei and the perfect placing of the digital organ in the mix, for once, made that a real joy.

With the solos in the highly capable hands of baritone Marcus Farnsworth and soprano Katy Anna Hill, it was nonetheless the young choir who deserved their ovation. Demonstrating beautiful diction, their dynamic control was also right on the button throughout. Although it is a big ask, this is a piece that really suits young voices, especially in Faure’s unorthodox choice of the In Paradisum as its last movement.