Sheku Kanneh-Mason

At six Sheku Kanneh-Mason took up the cello; at nine he had the highest Grade 8 marks in the country; at seventeen, in 2016, he won BBC Young Musician, the first Black musician to take the prize since the competition began in 1978. Born in 1999 and brought up in Nottingham, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Ben Davies and afterwards with Hannah Roberts. He played at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in May 2018; the same year his first album, Inspiration, became the best-selling British debut of the year, and Elgar, in 2020, made him the first cellist to reach the top ten of the UK album chart. He was appointed MBE in 2020. His instrument is a Matteo Goffriller cello of 1700. He records for Decca Classics, where Song followed in 2022 and Shostakovich and Britten, with John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London, in May 2025. The Royal Academy of Music made him its first Menuhin Visiting Professor of Performance Mentoring in May 2022, and in 2024 he became a patron of UK Music Masters. He gave the first performance of Edmund Finnis's Cello Concerto, written for him, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and held the artist residency of the New York Philharmonic in the 2025/26 season.