Pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason gave two performances at this year’s Cambridge Summer Music Festival – and also mentored some highly talented young pianists playing in a concert with her for a delighted audience on Saturday night (July 13).
Jeneba (above), who has just graduated from the Royal College of Music and is the sister of Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the cellist who played at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, helped to tutor four young pianists who, like her, have all won several accolades and awards.
On Friday, July 12, Jeneba gave a piano recital at Sidney Sussex College, playing Chopin, Scarlatti, Lizst and Prokofiev.
The next day on Saturday, July 13, she, and the young musicians played at West Road Concert Hall, in Cambridge.
Her playing can only be described as sublime – and theirs also. It was an evening of music played powerfully, delicately, and movingly.
The audience was in awe at the sensitive and flowing performances of complicated pieces.
Jeneba played a Debussy prelude and a piece by the American composer Florence Price, who in the 1930s was the first Black woman to have her work premiered by a United States orchestra.
All the young musicians have been accepted as scholars by the Lang Lang Foundation, a tutoring scheme (for the school holidays) where especially talented young musicians are accepted for a two-year programme of tuition and performance, funded by the foundation.
Scholars are chosen by the Chinese pianist Lang Lang himself. Now aged 41, in the 1990s, at a very young age, he was engaged by Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and several top American Orchestras.
This is the first year that the scholarship in his name, which began in the United States, has been extended to young musicians in the UK and in China.
Playing at West Road were Yuchen Gao aged 12; Deva Mira Sperandio, aged 16; Aidan Siqi Zhao, aged 12 and Julian Zhu aged 13.
Yuchen, from Shanghai, who has been playing the piano since he was four, has studied under Lang Lang and Lang Lang’s father, Guo Ren Lang. He played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in F major BWV 856 and a paraphrase on Strauss’s Fledermaus Waltz.
Deva from Valencia is studying at the Yehudi Menuhin School in London. Deva played Chopin’s Ballade No 3 Opus 47 and the first movement of a Chopin Sonata.
Aidan is at the King’s School in London and a junior member of the Royal College of Music. He played Beethoven’s Sonata in F, Opus 10, No 2: First movement and Alberto Ginastera’s Danza del gaucho matrero from Danzas Argentinas.
Julian, from Newcastle a pupil at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue Bb minor: Book One and Liszt’s Ballade No 2.
The concert was presented by Ben Johnson, the new director of Cambridge Summer Music Festival, who has extended the event across the whole of July. He is an opera singer, conductor, and a professor at The Royal College of Music.
He said he hoped Cambridge’s connection with the Lang Lang Foundation would continue after such an auspicious start.
Cambridge Summer Music continues until July 31. See brochures around the city and www.cambridgesummermusic.com
