Sheku Kanneh-Mason was travelling from London to Paris by Eurostar when he realised the seat next to him had been sold to a person, and not reserved for his 400-year-old Venetian cello as intended. A guard told him that the cello would be safe stashed in a cupboard at the end of one of the carriages. When the train arrived at Gare du Nord, he could not find the guard. When he eventually located the cupboard, the cupboard was empty. The cello was traced to a room in the station where international packages were stored. When Kanneh-Mason tried to claim it, they said they couldn’t hand it over without proof that it was his.
Actually, it isn’t. “I’ve never owned a cello,” says Kanneh-Mason, who played for an audience of two billion at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, performed the Elgar Cello Concerto at age 20 (just like Jacqueline du Pré), was awarded an MBE at 21 and will open the last night of the Proms on 10 September. “Am I opening?” he asks. “OK. I haven’t seen the running order.” Learning and performing on borrowed instruments, he acquired the Matteo Goffriller cello in 2021, in the midst of his run of extraordinary career milestones, and you’d assume this was because it was high time he had his own instrument. But it’s worth “a few million” he says, so it’s just on loan. Is owning a cello something one aspires to, you ask, a philistine crashing about in an alien world. “Well, it’s not realistic, to be honest,” says the world’s most unflappable classical musician, gently. Kanneh-Mason was not invited to the royal wedding reception – instead, he had a sandwich and wandered around Windsor for a while, then went home.
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