Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s career and performances span the globe. Whether performing for children in a school hall, at an underground club, or in the world’s leading concert venues, his mission is to make music accessible to all. After winning the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016, his performance at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at Windsor Castle in 2018 was watched by two billion people worldwide.

Highlights of the 2023–24 season include the Last Night of the Proms with the BBC Symphony and appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, Orquesta Nacional de España, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic on tour in Germany, Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, and Cincinnati Symphony. He makes his solo debut with the San Francisco Symphony with these performances, having previously appeared twice on the Great Performers Series, first in recital with his sister, Isata, and then on tour with the City of Birmingham Symphony and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.

This season with Isata, he appears in recital in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, in addition to a European recital tour. He also performs a series of duo recitals with guitarist Plínio Fernandes, continues his solo cello recital tour in the United States and Canada, and returns to Antigua, where he has family connections, as an ambassador for the Antigua and Barbuda Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Kanneh-Mason is a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied with Hannah Roberts, and in 2022 was appointed as the Academy’s first Menuhin Visiting Professor of Performance Mentoring. He is an ambassador for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Future Talent, and Music Masters, and was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List. He plays a Matteo Goffriller cello from 1700, which is on indefinite loan to him, and is a Decca Classics recording artist.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is the flagship of musical life in Birmingham and the West Midlands, and one of the world’s great orchestras. Based in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, the orchestra normally performs more than 150 concerts each year around the world. With a far-reaching community program and a family of choruses and ensembles, it is involved in every aspect of music-making in the Midlands. But at its center is a team of ninety professional musicians, and a 100-year tradition of making the world’s greatest music in the heart of Birmingham.

That local tradition started with the orchestra’s very first symphonic concert in 1920—conducted by Edward Elgar. Ever since then, through war, recessions, social change, and civic renewal, the CBSO has been proud to be Birmingham’s orchestra. Under principal conductors including Adrian Boult, George Weldon, Andrzej Panufnik, and Louis Frémaux, the CBSO won an artistic reputation that spread far beyond its region. But it was when it discovered the young British conductor Simon Rattle in 1980 that the CBSO became internationally famous—and showed how the arts can help give a new sense of direction to a whole city.

Mr. Rattle’s successors Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons helped cement that global reputation and continued to build on the CBSO’s tradition of flying the flag for Birmingham. And under the dynamic leadership of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the CBSO continued to do what it does best—playing great music for the people of Birmingham, the Midlands, and beyond. In September of last year, the Orchestra announced that Japanese conductor Kazuki Yamada, who has been the Orchestra’s principal guest conductor since 2018, had been appointed as its chief conductor and artistic advisor with effect from April 2023.

(9/2022)