theartsdesk Q&A: violinist Braimah and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, guitarist Plínio Fernandes, on their two Fantasia Proms

It seems like only yesterday – the date in fact was 22 December 2016 – that 17-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason, fresh from his win as BBC Young Musician of the Year, played the Haydn C major Cello Concerto in a Pimlico church with a group of young players known collectively as the Fantasia Orchestra and conducted by Tom Fetherstonhaugh (Sibelius’s Second Symphony followed).

In the orchestra was the cellist's 18-year-old violinist brother Braimah. The constitution of the players wasn’t something I knew at the time. Braimah (pictured below by Ron Milsom in a Fantasia concert at the Guiting Festival earlier this summer) clarifies: “That was one of the very first concerts of Fantasia. It was essentially made up of friends mostly from the Junior Royal Academy of Music, and those who weren’t Junior Academy were friends of people from the Academy, whom we knew from courses like the National Youth Orchestra and Music Works. I’ve been very lucky in that Junior Academy had a small number of individuals per year group. That inevitably brings you very close, and the music industry is also very small, so you do end up seeing the same people over and over again.

"Tom and I were at Junior Academy together, we had the same violin teacher, when he went to study music at Oxford and I stayed in London and went to the Academy, we stayed in touch and he then came and did his Masters in conducting at the Academy, so there was that consistent overlap. There’s nothing more enjoyable than playing music with friends, and that’s what Fantasia Orchestra has always been about, and that’s what made that concert in Pimlico very special.”

Sheku gives further context:  “I have strong memories of that Haydn performance, even though it was a long time ago. What’s been really nice about my relationship with Tom and with Fantasia is that I felt I’ve learnt a lot of the core pieces of the cello repertoire with this orchestra. I remember working on the Shostakovich Second a lot with Tom, and had some sessions with Mark Wigglesworth, just with that pair – we rehearsed it in London and performed it in Norwich with Fantasia. And the Dvořák Concerto you also heard [in St Mary Abbot’s, in an effective small scale arrangement at a time when Covid restrictions ruled out a full orchestra] was one of the first performances of that piece I was doing as well, and again I learnt the piece with this ensemble. There may only have been 12 players, but they were all strong ones.”

Guitarist Plínio Fernandes (pictured below by Ron Milsom with Sheku Kanneh-Mason at the Guiting Festival) forged bonds with his near-contemporaries a little later. “I wasn’t at the Junior Academy at quite the same time as Sheku, Braimah and Tom – I joined the Senior Academy years later. But I quickly became close with the Kanneh-Mason boys. I’ve given concerts with Sheku, and lately I’ve been playing a lot with Braimah, we did a tour of 18 concerts in 20 days between January and February, My connection with both boys is really strong – we’ve lived together for almost seven years now, we have that lovely connection, Tom is close friends with them, so that was a natural bridge for me to make. The best partnerships are the ones where you connect on a personal level as well. So Sheku with his siblings and his friends, and then Tom, they have the history that they learned music together, they played chamber music at the Junior Academy, which paved the way in their musical education together, so it means a lot to go on stage. Of course there are certain partnerships that are suggested by the label or a festival or certain circumstances, but playing with your friends is the best situation.”

So many people will never forget the BBC documentary about the seven Kanneh-Mason siblings, with Plínio a welcome guest, playing together at home during an unnaturally sunny Lockdown spring. Braimah says: “we were incredibly lucky to have that, it gave us such a structure to have those Facebook lives in which we could regularly engage with people who tuned in, so for us to be able to practise with a sense of immediate purpose and still having that feeling of connecting to audiences, and then of course being able to have classical music on BBC One, to have Bartók on BBC One, was really special. And it’s also a nice documentation for us, of a memory which we can look back on for the rest of our lives, to remind ourselves with a snapshot into only the positive side of that particular bubble of lockdown involving our musical side. Because of course there were lots of negatives. But for us it was really nice to have that structure, and we were very very grateful for it.” Plinio: “it often feels like documentaries are very manufactured, but in that case what you see is how the Kanneh-Masons genuinely are in terms of exchanging love through music with each other.” It's worth remembering that these players are of a generation which had to cope with the severances of Covid. Some young musicians suffered badly; others thrived. Sheku: “It was a unique time. But as musicians we should be creative within our art but also creative in the way that we present it. That’s a challenge that will always be present no matter the circumstances, but Covid brought it to the forefront in many ways. It was a challenging time, but lots of wonderful projects were still happening.”

Braimah, reflecting on how social media formed a lot of exchanges, remarks that it also “gives a bit more power to individuals to promote themselves, but also since all of the lockdowns the industry has been a lot more volatile in a sense, so many organisataions had to close and so many cuts were made. My year group graduated in to that 2020 lockdown year. The only way really unless you were extremely fortunate was to organize your own concerts and your own festivals and programmes, that’s what Tom and many other young people did, and it’s taken us forward in one aspect of our performing lives” Plinio says he was surprised at his swift good fortune: “I was finishing my Masters in September 2020, all those question marks were there about what’s the future for performance, and quite a few friends who were at the Academy dropped their studies, then Decca came and offered me a contract, a multi-album contract and I was like, wow.”

And here they are, about to see many old friends again. Plínio observes that “Sheku’s career is multifaceted, he plays different things with different artists for different reasons, so when he has a chance to play together with his friends, in a connection that has been going for so many years, well, you look each other in the eye and connect at a personal level, as well as musically, which is vital. Sheku: “It doesn’t seem like I have to do a balancing act, I simply enjoy the variety of projects that I have – they all feed into one another and form a part of my musical life, and the wide-ranging nature of it is something that also appeals to me, as well as the appeal of the projects individually. It doesn’t feel difficult, because it’s often led by what I want to do. For this programme, from all the names we had on a big list, we devised a wonderful list of repertoire that we all like for various and sometimes different reasons, and have liked in different contexts, and wanted to bring all that together in one programme.” Braimah: “There’s a personal relationship that we all have with each other which in many cases goes back over a decade longer than the Fantasia Orchestra’s founding. The concerts in the summer will feel almost like a reunion”. Braimah and Plínio played with select Fantasians at the Proms launch (pictured above): a joyous preview which put the spotlight on the venture right at the start. But that was in a small hall of the Royal College of Music. The two Proms in the Royal Albert Hall will be rather different. “It feels massive when you step out on that stage and look out,” says Sheku, “it feels such a big space, but maybe because of the shape of it being in the round, and having Prommers so close, the intimacy comes. I think a lot of it has to do with people’s spirit when they come to the Proms, their willingness to share and celebrate music. A lot of the time I simply enjoy being together with other musicians, and we’ll listen to music, and pass on Spotify discoveries – ‘what have you been listening to?’ – a massive mix of music, and it’s good to share what we like. This programme reminds me of that experience, it’s quite living-room-like, and it will be nice to bring that to a space as big as the Albert Hall.”

Plínio will be making his Proms debut: “playing in the Albert Hall is quite something. I’ve Prommed many, many times, from my first year here in 2014, every year, I love that hall. I’ve been looking forward to this – I think the arrangements [by Harry Baker, another Junior Academy graduate, whom I heard play and sing with Sheku at the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park] are really well written, and the three soloists shine quite a lot through those arrangements, it’s wonderful. I’ll play a duet with Sheku which we’ve recorded, “The Girl from Ipanema” from my first album, newly orchestrated, Piazzolla’s Libertango, Bob Marley – those are among the highlights for the guitar”.

What about the second, “relaxed” Prom? “There’s this series called Through the Noise, the tour I did with Braimah was through them, all over the UK, so that atmosphere of connecting with the public in a more direct way, playing in night clubs for instance, speaking to people and bouncing back, was great fun to do. It’s lovel to have the acoustic of, say, the Wigmore Hall, but this has a different energy because you feel that you are contributing to something, because the people that come to those relaxed events ask, is it classical, what’s this classical music, what’s Mozart, if you strike up a friendship then they feel like coming back. This is music that connects straight away, as opposed to modern, avant-garde language.” Braimah expands: “There’s a unique element with audiences not used to classical performers. In my teenage years I did a lot of performances as a background player, or playing at dinners, and when you do that you hear the clang of plates as you eat, but you notice is that if you play in a certain way – and sometimes you can’t do anything about it if people don’t want to listen – you can actively demand the listener’s attention.

“When the family played Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals in the Albert Hall, it was a children’s Prom, and children are much more uninhibited. Of course you get a bit of general noise, but then when they’re really listening and something is lively, they will dance. There’s something quite exciting about playing to an audience where how you play makes a noticeable difference and you feel like you have slightly more relevance in some ways, which is really fun. I’ve not actually been an audience member in a casual Prom, only a children’s one, so I’m looking forward to experiencing this for the first time.” Maybe time for many of the rest of us to give it a go too.

• The Fantasia Orchestra and its special guests perform at Prom 20 on Sunday morning and Prom 22 (Relaxed Prom) on Monday morning
• Read Proms reviews on theartsdesk