He was born to Stuart Mason, from London, a luxury hotel business manager of Antiguan descent,[4][5] and Dr. Kadiatu Kanneh, from Sierra Leone, a former lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of the 2020 book House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons.
[10] At the age of nine, he passed the Grade 8 cello examination with the highest marks in the UK,[11][12] and won the Marguerite Swan Memorial Prize.
[1][14][15] Kanneh-Mason received his non-specialist education as a pupil at the Trinity School, Nottingham,[15] where he studied for A levels in Music, Maths and Physics.
He won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year contest in May 2016, later telling The Observer that appearing on Britain's Got Talent had been "a good experience for getting used to performing in front of lots of people, with cameras and interviews.
The record deal was signed on board a Nottingham City Transport bus which the local authority had named in his honour after Kanneh-Mason won the BBC Young Musician contest.
[18] The label announced that his first recording would feature the piece with which he won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year contest, Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No.1.
Orchestra, which was founded by Chi-chi Nwanoku for black and minority ethnic classical musicians; his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason and brother Braimah are also members.
It's so important we're celebrating music by black composers, too, like the piece by Chevalier de Saint-Georges we're playing in September.In November 2016, Kanneh-Mason was the subject of a BBC Four documentary entitled Young, Gifted and Classical: The Making of a Maestro.
[20] The following month, he was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's Front Row round-up of the year's major arts and entertainment award winners.
[25] Also in February 2018 Kanneh-Mason became the first artist ever to be re-invited to perform a second time at the British Academy Film Awards, playing "Evening of Roses" by Yosef Hadar [Wikidata] in an arrangement by Tom Hodge.
[26] For his second BAFTA performance, Kanneh-Mason was joined on stage at the Royal Albert Hall by his siblings Isata, Braimah, Konya, and Jeneba.
[34] On 9 September 2023, Kanneh-Mason was the instrumental soloist at the Last Night of the Proms, performing alongside soprano Lise Davidsen, and conducted by Marin Alsop.
[47] Kanneh-Mason appears as a guest artist on the album Tecchler’s Cello: from Cambridge to Rome by cellist and fellow BBC Young Musician winner Guy Johnston, released in September 2017.
1 (accompanied by the CBSO conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla) as well as shorter works by Shostakovich, Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, Casals and Kanneh-Mason's own arrangement of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry".