Hill Auditorium
Canceled Event:
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, cello &
Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano
We regret to inform audiences that this concert has been canceled. UMS has contacted all ticket buyers via email or phone with options to refund or donate their tickets.
Sheku’s ongoing recovery from a finger injury is taking longer than he had anticipated to heal, and with huge regret, he is withdrawing from all of his concerts through the end of May 2026. We plan to invite Sheku and Isata to return to Hill Auditorium once they are touring together again.
Regretfully, our attempts to find a suitable replacement for this concert were not successful due in part to artist schedules and in part to the difficulty of securing international visas on relatively short notice.
Thank You to Our Sponsors
PRESENTING SPONSOR
- Max Wicha and Sheila Crowley
PRINCIPAL SPONSOR
- James and Nancy Stanley
MEDIA PARTNERS
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is already in great demand from major orchestras and concert halls worldwide. He became a household name in 2018 after performing at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at Windsor Castle, his performance having been greeted with universal excitement after being watched by nearly two billion people globally. Sheku initially garnered renown as the winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition, the first Black musician to take the title. He has released two chart-topping albums on the Decca Classics label, Inspiration in 2018 and Elgar in 2020. The latter reached No. 8 in the overall UK Official Album Chart, making Sheku the first cellist in history to reach the UK Top 10.
Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason is in great demand internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. She offers eclectic and interesting repertoire with recital programmes encompassing music from Haydn and Mozart via Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, Chopin and Brahms to Gershwin and beyond. In concerto, she is equally at home in Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann (whose piano concerto featured on Isata’s chart-topping debut recording) as in Prokofiev and Dohnányi.
Isata is a Decca Classics recording artist. Her 2019 album, Romance – the Piano Music of Clara Schumann, entered the UK classical charts at No. 1, Gramophone magazine extolling the recording as “one of the most charming and engaging debuts”. This was followed by 2021’s Summertime, featuring 20th-century American repertoire including a world premiere recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Impromptu in B minor and 2023’s endearingly titled album Childhood Tales is a tour-de-force showcase of music inspired by a nostalgia for youth. 2021 also saw the release of Isata’s first duo album, Muse, with her brother Sheku Kanneh-Mason, demonstrating the siblings’ musical empathy and rapport borne from years of playing and performing together.
Isata was an ECHO Rising Star in 21/22 performing in many of Europe’s finest halls and she is also the recipient of the coveted Leonard Bernstein Award, an Opus Klassik award for best young artist and is one of the Konzerthaus Dortmund’s Junge Wilde artists.
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