Fashion
When Your $3 Million Cello Gets Bumped From Your Flight
The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason had to cancel a concert in Toronto last week after an airline refused to let him board with his instrument, even though he had bought a ticket for it.
The miseries of flying for work are well documented. Delays. Cancellations. The eternal gamble: to check or not to check bags, risking damaged or lost luggage.
For professional cellists, whose tools of the trade are extremely delicate instruments that can be worth thousands if not millions of dollars, and which certainly do not fit into the overhead bins, flying can be exponentially worse.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a rising star in classical music who performed at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018 and has since become a regular on many of the world’s most prestigious concert stages, was forced to cancel a concert in Toronto last week because Air Canada refused to allow him to board a plane with his cello, even though he had purchased a separate ticket for it.
“This is an all too frequent occurrence for traveling cellists and other musicians with instruments that need to go in the cabin,” Kanneh-Mason said in a statement on Tuesday.
The episode, which struck a chord with cellists around the world, occurred last week when Kanneh-Mason and his sister, Isata, a pianist, were on tour and trying to fly from Cincinnati to Toronto, with a connection in Washington. Their original flight, on American Airlines, was delayed and then canceled, a spokeswoman said. So they bought tickets on a new flight to Toronto on Air Canada — including one for his cello.
Kanneh-Mason said that “we were given conflicting information by Air Canada throughout the long process, culminating with staff denying our boarding with the cello at the gate.”
