Sheku’s Finnis Concerto and Bruckner’s Ninth

About the Work

This Cello Concerto is a new work written for Sheku Kanneh-Mason and jointly commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Kanneh-Mason gave the world premiere with the LA Phil at Walt Disney Concert Hall on 21 November 2025. Tonight the LSO plays its share of that commission: a chance to hear a significant new concerto by a living British composer, played by the cellist it was written for.

Finnis has called it “the most lyrical, intense and emotionally direct music that I have written so far”, and it is tailored to Kanneh-Mason’s particular gifts: his singing tone, his lyrical warmth, his unforced directness. Finnis’s music is celebrated for its shimmering textures and its clarity, so expect the solo cello less as a combatant battling the orchestra than as a singing voice that emerges from glowing instrumental colour and dissolves back into it. At around twenty-five minutes, it moves from introspective beauty to passages of powerful, sustained energy. Here it is framed by the vast Romantic spirituality of Bruckner.

What to Listen For

As a very new work, come to it with fresh ears and no expectations of famous tunes. With Finnis, the rewards lie in colour, texture and line. Listen for the way the solo cello sings long, expressive melodies (Finnis writes beautifully for the voice-like quality of the instrument), and for the finely detailed orchestral textures that surround it, often delicate and luminous rather than heavy.

Listen for the relationship between soloist and orchestra: how the cello emerges from the ensemble, is echoed and coloured by it, and how Finnis builds atmosphere and momentum through shifting harmony and instrumental light rather than through conventional display. Above all, listen to Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s tone, warm, lyrical and deeply communicative, in music written to show it off. It is a rare opportunity to hear a new concerto near the very start of its life, in the hands of the cellist it was written for.

About the Work

Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony is his last word, and one of the most profound farewells in all of music. He began it in 1887 and was still working on it when he died in 1896, leaving it unfinished: the first three movements are complete, but the finale survives only in extensive sketches. Bruckner, a deeply devout Catholic, dedicated the symphony ‘to the dear God’ (dem lieben Gott). The three completed movements form a coherent and overwhelming whole, so the work is almost always performed, as tonight, in three movements. Tonight’s performance uses the scholarly Urtext edition by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs.

The symphony returns to the D minor of Beethoven’s Ninth, and shares its sense of confronting the ultimate. It is vast, granitic and visionary, built from Bruckner’s characteristic great blocks of sound, long-breathed paragraphs and shattering brass climaxes, but pushed here to new extremes of harmonic daring and emotional depth. Bruckner called the slow movement his ‘Farewell to Life’. It is an Adagio of unprecedented harmonic adventurousness and spiritual intensity, ending in serene acceptance: a fitting, if unintended, close to the symphony and to Bruckner’s life. Its early history is notable too. The first performance, in Vienna in 1903, used a heavily ‘improved’ version by the conductor Ferdinand Löwe, and Bruckner’s actual score was not heard until 1932.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Feierlich, misterioso: ‘solemn, mysterious’) grows, as so often in Bruckner, from a hushed string tremor, with horn calls emerging out of the mist. Listen for how it builds through vast paragraphs to a tremendous, dissonant climax and a hammering D minor unison of overwhelming power.

The Scherzo is one of Bruckner’s most extraordinary. It is not a genial dance but something demonic and obsessive: stamping, dissonant chords and a relentless, almost mechanical drive, framing a strangely fleet, ghostly trio. It is among the most modern-sounding music Bruckner ever wrote.

The Adagio is the heart of the work and Bruckner’s farewell. Listen for the great leaping theme that opens it (a yearning rise in the violins), for the noble, chorale-like passages on the Wagner tubas, and for the shattering, grinding dissonance at its climax, perhaps the most anguished moment in all Bruckner. Then the music subsides into a long, glowing, peaceful coda, quoting earlier works and dying away into acceptance. With no triumphant finale to follow, this quiet, transcendent close becomes the final word of the symphony and of the composer.