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British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason won the prestigious BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2016 when he was just 17 years old, performing Shostakovich's fiendish Cello Concerto No. 1. The first Black musician to win the competition in its 38-year history, Kanneh-Mason was born and raised in a suburb of Nottingham, England. The third of seven siblings who all turned out to be exceptionally musically talented, he was inspired initially by his eldest sister Isata, who showed an early aptitude for the piano and was accepted at the age of eight into the Royal Academy of Music's junior department. Following in her footsteps, Sheku took up the cello at the age of six, and, aged nine, won a scholarship to also attend the Royal Academy. He joined Chineke, Europe's first BAME (Black and minority ethnic) classical orchestra, and, together with Isata and his violinist brother Braimah, formed the Kanneh-Mason Trio, appearing in 2015 on Britain's Got Talent. His experience on the show prepared him for Young Musician's relatively sedate televised segments. After winning Young Musician, where his playing immediately drew comparisons with Jacqueline du Pré, he was signed by Decca. His 2018 debut album Inspiration featured the Shostakovich concerto along with other classical pieces and his own versions of songs by Bob Marley and Leonard Cohen. It became the first debut album by a Young Musician winner to chart, entering the U.K. pop rankings at number 18. That same spring, he and an orchestra performed for guests at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle while the couple signed the register. ~ John D. Buchanan

The oldest of the seven performing Kanneh-Mason siblings, Isata Kanneh-Mason has garnered both critical and commercial success. She has performed as a solo player as well as with her siblings and other musicians. Her career has developed somewhat more slowly than those of some of her younger brothers and sisters, but it grew strongly in the early 2020s with major prizes and the release of several critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums on the Decca label. In 2024, she issued the album Mendelssohn.

Isata Kanneh-Mason was born in Nottingham, in England's East Midlands, on May 27, 1996. Her father, Stuart Mason, is a business executive of Antiguan background; her mother, Kadiatu Kanneh, is a university educator born in Sierra Leone and has chronicled her experiences in the book Raising the Kanneh-Masons. Like most of the other siblings, Isata attended the Royal Academy of Music. She earned an undergraduate degree as an Elton John Scholar, and she performed with her benefactor in 2013 in Los Angeles. Kanneh-Mason received a master's degree from the Academy in 2020, studying with Carole Presland and Hamish Milne, and she continued her studies with Alasdair Beatson. Kanneh-Mason won several major prizes at home and abroad, including the Opus Klassik Award in Germany for Best Young Artist in 2020 and, the following year, the Leonard Bernstein Award.

In July 2019, Kanneh-Mason released her debut album on the Decca label, Romance: The Piano Music of Clara Schumann, which entered British classical charts at No. 1. Kanneh-Mason and her siblings performed a streaming chamber version of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, from their home in Nottingham during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. She made her recital debut at Wigmore Hall that year, featuring female composers for International Women's Day, and also appeared in streamed concerto performances with several major orchestras. Her second album, Summertime, featuring works by Gershwin and other American composers, appeared in the summer of 2021. During the 2021-2022 season, she performed a full schedule of concertos with major orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic (at the Hollywood Bowl), the Dallas Symphony, and the Royal Philharmonic. That season, she also served as the Young Artist in Residence with the Liverpool Philharmonic, and she also embarked on a solo recital tour of North America. Kanneh-Mason often plays duets with her younger brother, Sheku, and she has performed chamber music with a variety of other artists. She released the cello-and-piano recital Muse with Sheku in 2021, following that up with the solo album Childhood Tales in 2022. In 2023, she made her solo debut at the BBC Proms, performing Prokofiev's Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 26. The following year, she released the album Mendelssohn, which contained works by both Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. ~ James Manheim