UK-based Edirisinghe brothers in debut Colombo concert
On YouTube and in concert halls around the world, siblings in classical music are very much in vogue. The celebrated British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason has six siblings, all of whom play one or two instruments. Four of this modern-day von Trapp family have attended the prestigious Royal College of Music in London; their mother, a professor of literature, has written a memoir about raising such a talented brood. The Nottingham City Council named a bus after Sheku while the Financial Times applauded the septet in an article headlined “Sibling Harmony”.
Danushka Edirisinghe
In the Netherlands, meanwhile, a piano-playing pair of brothers, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, have been feted on YouTube since they were adolescents. The Dutch duo, who play with some of the melodramatic flourishes of Chinese piano superstar Lang Lang and wear mandarin jackets as well, have also recorded Bach’s concertos for two pianos (BWV 1060 and 1061) with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta for Deutsche Gramophone.
Sri Lanka can claim to have been a forerunner of the trend with pianist Druvi de Saram and cellist Rohan de Saram performing decades ago in prestigious venues in London and elsewhere. Posters from yesteryear in the family’s beautiful Geoffrey Bawa designed home in Colombo, with a jewel box of a music room, evoke wonder and awe at their success in a very different era.
On August 10 and 11, another pair of brothers of Sri Lankan origin also based in the UK, Avishka Edirisinghe, a pianist and conductor, and Danushka Edirisinghe, an award-winning cellist and the younger of the two, will perform a bountiful smorgasbord of music that includes compositions by Beethoven, Schumann, Shostakovich and Chopin’s Etude opus 25, No. 7.
The two brothers have carved out stellar careers in the UK. Avishka, who studied at the Royal College of Music, has been an opera pianist and assistant conductor at the prestigious almost century-old Glyndebourne Opera and assistant conductor at the Garsington Opera, both unmissable events on the English summer calendar in stunningly beautiful, historic settings. Danushka a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music has already won a number of prestigious prizes, including the Haslemere International String Competition in 2022 and the Sir John Barbirolli Memorial Prize when he graduated.
Avishka Edirisinghe
In January this year, Danushka was part of an extraordinary concert at London’s Barbican Hall and played as a soloist with the Britten Sinfonia. The concert featured the multi-talented Jacob Collier and the conductor was Suzie Collier, Jacob’s mother as well as a former teacher to the lead violinist of the Britten Sinfonia. The concert was another diverse and rich offering that included movements by Bach and Barber as well as Piazzola’s lush Spring from the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.
As the fascination that the Collier mother-and-son combination, the Kanneh-Masons and the Jussen brothers have evoked demonstrates, family bonds in classical music can be a boon when combined with such abundant talent. Occasionally, the celebrity can extract a toll, however. Speaking in January 2024 on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio show Kanneh-Mason was asked if the colonial era, hyper-nationalist anthem, Rule, Britannia, should be dropped from the last night of the Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall. When he said it was out of place in the multicultural country that the UK is today, Kanneh-Mason’s response generated a savage social media backlash against the young British superstar, whose mother is originally from Sierra Leone and father from Antigua.
With any luck, as their careers progress, the gifted Edirisinghe brothers should face only warm applause. News of their debut concert in Colombo sparked such a run on tickets that the August 11 concert at 7.30 p.m. sold out almost immediately. The CMSC had to add a second concert at the Goethe Institut on August 10, which has almost sold out as well. With concerts featuring supremely talented siblings being all the rage worldwide, dynamic pricing for tickets may be on the cards.
A handful of tickets and any returns for the August 10 concert will be available at the Goethe Institut before the concert at 7.30 p.m. August 11 is sold out.
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