Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, Snape Maltings, review: a concert that put the Proms to shame

Nature’s restorative air-conditioning has helped several music venues get back to outdoor performance this month. But Snape Maltings, home of the Aldeburgh Festival, in Suffolk, wins the prize for being the first major concert hall in Britain to welcome an audience back indoors. Some 900 tickets were sold to six concerts last weekend, and the venue will repeat the formula going forward, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 2pm and 7pm.

Restarting after five months of silence may be challenging – the hall’s capacity has been reduced from 800 to 150 and audience members must wear masks – but under its chief executive Roger Wright, Britten Pears Arts is leading the way in a country where the lack of any discernible arts policy is stifling musical recovery. Elsewhere in the world, careful protocols have made it possible to get people back to music, and these Snape concerts ought to be a rejoinder to what’s left of this summer’s Proms, an institution once run by Wright: the absence of vision among his successors means even small audiences are being kept out of the Royal Albert Hall – a venue ideally suited to physical distancing.

And the musicians chosen to perform at Snape on Friday and Saturday were top notch – the Chineke! Chamber Ensemble and Tasmin Little with Martin Roscoe. The highlight, however, came on Sunday: Sheku Kanneh-Mason – the 21-year-old cellist who first enthralled audiences when he won the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016 – and his 23-year-old pianist sister Isata.

Before lockdown, an hour-long programme might have left the audience feeling short-changed, but in these changed circumstances the Kanneh-Masons’ concert was perfectly judged. Indeed, with so much musical gorgeousness on show in the Cello Sonatas of Samuel Barber and Sergei Rachmaninov, anything more might have been too much of a good thing.

Barber’s Sonata is one of his early works – incredibly, the first American cello sonata – and signalled the emergence of an important composer. The lyrical impulse of virtually all Barber’s music is already evident, as Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s warmly introspective cello confirmed. Complex rhythmic figures underpin the dialogue between cello and piano, which flowed smoothly thanks to sibling instinct.

The hymnlike opening of the second movement is interrupted by a virtuosic middle section, and similar tensions are heard in the finale, where formidable piano passages and the cello’s passionately singing lines were all superbly realised. Barber once commented on a distinguished interpretation, “I had forgotten I wanted to sound that way – dramatic. And he plays with fire.” He might have said the same here.

Rachmaninov’s Sonata is contemporaneous with his Second Piano Concerto, and inhabits a similar soundworld. It was also his first essay in sonata form, and Rachmaninov unsurprisingly gave the piano a leading role; Isata Kanneh-Mason relished everything from its virtuosity to its bell-like sonorities.

Through the tumbling scherzo, melancholy slow movement and sweeping finale, Sheku Kanneh-Mason played with generous tone, showing that he really meant it when he called the sonata one of his “all-time favourite works”.