Packed house for return of extraordinary cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Newbury Spring Festival

Newbury Spring Festival: Sheku Kanneh-Mason and the Castalian Quartet

at the Corn Exchange

on Thursday, May 15

Review by TREVOR DEFFERD

HAVING experienced the extraordinary play A Vision of Beethoven earlier in the day at Englefield House, the evening concert at the Corn Exchange, featuring the music of Beethoven’s contemporary, Franz Schubert, proved the perfect complement.

The programme opened with Schubert’s Quartettsatz, a stand-alone sonata-form movement originally designed to be part of a longer work (like the composer’s Unfinished Symphony), played by the Castalian Quartet, comprising Sini Simonen and Daniel Roberts (violins), Natalie Loughran (viola) and Steffan Morris (cello).

Fiery tremolando chords worthy of Beethoven (and in the same key as that composer’s 5th Symphony) were juxtaposed with typical Schubertian lyricism. The players showed a telepathic understanding, although their joyless expressions did not always reflect the music.

A packed audience had undoubtedly come to hear the wunderkind Sheku Kanneh-Mason, on his first return to the festival since 2018.

In less than 10 years since becoming the first black artist to win the BBC Young Musician competition, Sheku has forged an impressive career as a cellist.

His stated mission to make music accessible to all was exemplified by his afternoon masterclass for local schoolchildren. His solo contribution to the first half of the evening concert, however, may not have been entirely accessible to most of the audience.

Natalie Klouda’s Suite for Solo Cello was certainly a shock to the system on first hearing.

Drawing inspiration from Bach and the sound-world of Indian vocal music, the six movements – a mixture of the hypnotic and demented – certainly enabled the soloist to display the full range of his technique, with plenty of double-stopping, drone effects and glissandi.

Fellow British composer Thomas Adès’ Arcadiana for String Quartet provided similarly challenging listening.

Its ethereal opening, with fleeting echoes of Ravel, and the beautiful (and most tonal) O Albion, a tribute to Elgar’s Nimrod, were in marked contrast to the rest of the work. Indeed, the Tango Mortale was more akin to the soundtrack of a horror film.

Sheku Kanneh-Mason returned after the interval for Schubert’s substantial four-movement String Quintet in C Major, composed in the last year of his life.

The unusual addition of a second cello to the string quartet provided a richer sonority, most evident in the second subject of a weighty first movement.

A ternary-form adagio was followed by the rustic vigour of the scherzo and a rondo finale which accelerated towards a dramatic conclusion.

Prolonged applause was clearly in appreciation of the virtuosic playing throughout, if not necessarily the entire choice of programme.

At the end of my day at the festival, I discovered one of life’s strange coincidences – that the graves of Beethoven and Schubert lie adjacent to each other in Vienna.

How appropriate!