Ravel | Elgar | Stravinsky at The Bridgewater Hall
Will Fulford-Jones
Ravel – Le tombeau de Couperin (18’)
Elgar – Cello Concerto (27’)
Stravinsky – Petrushka (1947 version) (34’)
Since winning the BBC Young Musician award in 2016, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason has performed everywhere from the Royal Albert Hall, for the BBC Proms, to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, for the wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle. Still a teenager, Kanneh-Mason is now combining his studies at the Royal Academy of Music with an increasingly busy career as a sought-after soloist – and to mark the centenary of Armistice, which ended the First World War in November 1918, Kanneh-Mason and conductor Joana Carneiro are turning their attention to one of the best-known and best-loved cello concertos in the repertoire, Elgar’s memorial for a world changed beyond recognition by the conflict. The other two works on the programme date from the same era, though they’re very different in tone and scope. While Stravinsky’s kinetic Petrushka anticipates the shock of the same composer’s Rite of Spring, which was written just a couple of years later, Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin pays gentler homage to the music of the French baroque era.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason cello
Joana Carneiro conductor
