United States Blossom Music Festival 2025 [6]: Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Cleveland Orchestra / Stephanie Childress (conductor). Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga Falls, 23.8.2025. (MSJ)
Britten – Simple Symphony, Op.4
Saint-Saëns – Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor, Op.33
Mendelssohn – Symphony No.3 in A minor, Op.56, ‘Scottish’
When it comes to cello concertos, the work in A minor by Saint-Saëns is often relegated to lesser status, a filler for the list of top works after the Elgar and Dvořák concertos and perhaps a few others. Leave it to Sheku Kanneh-Mason to energize and shape the musical argument to the point that the Saint-Saëns stands proudly on its own as an interesting and moving work. Joined by the Cleveland Orchestra under the poised direction of Stephanie Childress, the performance brought the piece ardently and elegantly to life. It was particularly interesting to see Childress and Kanneh-Mason working together so adeptly, considering that they were previously competitors in the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition where Kanneh-Mason famously won and Childress, playing violin, was one of the finalists.
Kanneh-Mason’s sheer energy made the work’s first section vivid, registering with genuine urgency and not just virtuosic flash. The slower minuet that follows brought a poignancy missing in most performances, suggesting that these performers gave the piece more thought than is usually the case. Saint-Saëns famously said that he produced music like an apple tree produces apples, but that doesn’t mean there’s not real emotion to be found in his music. There is, and it was here, the cellist listening ecstatically when he wasn’t playing. Kanneh-Mason kept the momentum going through the more discursive and rhapsodic finale, bringing the concerto to a satisfying close. Audience reaction was very warm, drawing a breathtaking encore: Prelude 3 by Edmond Finnis.
Making her Blossom debut with the Clevelanders, Childress was notable for her classical poise. At just 26, she is a very young conductor, but one of promise who didn’t waste time and energy on grandstanding gestures. Her movements were compact and focused, completely geared to getting the job done. That meant that Britten’s Simple Symphony – astonishingly, receiving its first full performance by the Cleveland Orchestra – landed delightfully, with no attempts to overload its textures. The Pizzicato scherzo, in particular, was a treat in the Blossom pavilion’s ringing acoustic.
In the Mendelssohn ‘Scottish’ Symphony, Childress likewise kept a reserved poise, refusing to treat the music like a late-Romantic blockbuster. Her opening tempo in the first movement flowed and, as a string player herself, she drew a lyrical but energized sound from the strings, particularly in the slow movement. Unlike many conductors who wielded a bow before a baton, Childress never forgot the winds and brass, making sure that their parts were prominent and well-shaped. Principal clarinet Afendi Yusuf shone in the numerous clarinet solos, ranging from the glee of the ‘Scottish snap’ scherzo to the forlorn solo just before the finale’s coda.
That coda is often debated. Conductor Otto Klemperer infamously hated it so much that he recomposed it to make the work end tragically, as he thought it should, though no one performs that version (and rightly so – it’s awful). Others have railed against the tendency of some performances in years past to get too grand and majestic, resulting in a counterreaction that has seen most performances of the coda in recent years skipping along at quite a pace. Childress refused the extremes and charted her own course, allowing stirring majesty without pushing the tempo to absurd briskness nor dragging it sluggishly. The one thing that would have benefitted the performance was a greater flexibility at transition points, something that can still be achieved within a classical framework (see, for instance, Herbert Blomstedt’s Cleveland performance a few years back). Regardless, it was a distinguished regular-concert debut for Childress, and a solid close to a good summer season at Blossom.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
Featured Image: Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Saint-Saëns with the Cleveland Orchestra © Roger Mastroianni/TCO