Cellist
Photo: Tam Okabe
Diary
Brahms — Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38
Mori — Three Songs from Kumamoto
Franck — Sonata in A, arranged for cello
with Agnes Weir, piano
Bach — Suite No. 1 in G, BWV 1007
Kanade Mori — arrangements from Komoriuta
Bring a blanket; the music starts when the swifts do. Free for under-12s.
Harrogate Autumn Series Postponed
Elgar — Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
Postponed to the spring while the hall's organ restoration finishes — new date to follow.
Cardiff Lunchtime Concerts
Kodály — Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8
28 July 2026 Grantham Recital Club, The Guildhall, Grantham
2 April 2026 Komoriuta — launch recital, The Print Room, London
5 August 2025 The Meadow Recitals — second season, Longcroft Meadow, near Burford
26 February 2025 Tokyo recital debut, Hakuju Hall, Tokyo
Recent
News will appear here — do check back.
On record
Bellfound Records, May 2025
Kanade Mori, cello
Eleven Japanese songs — lullabies, school songs, one her grandmother sang while hanging washing — arranged for solo cello and recorded at first light in a wooden chapel, windows open. The record the arrangements were always heading towards.
Editor's Choice — The Bow
Bellfound Records, September 2023
Kanade Mori, cello
The first three suites, recorded in the resonant quiet of a decommissioned reservoir — Bach with the long echo the meadow taught her to wait for.
Kanade Mori is a cellist from Kumamoto, based in London — a recitalist and concerto soloist known for programmes that put Japanese songs beside the sonata repertoire, and for the Meadow Recitals, a summer series played entirely outdoors.
She began the cello at five, in a school hall with an instrument taller than she was, and came to Europe at eighteen — first Tokyo, then London, where a teacher told her to stop playing everything as though it were an audition. She counts that sentence as the beginning of her career.
Her recital partnership with the pianist Agnes Weir began as a last-minute substitution and has outlasted the diary that caused it. Together they work through the sonata literature at the rate of two a season, on the theory that a programme should contain at least one piece the players are still frightened of.
Alongside the recital work she arranges: Japanese songs — lullabies, school songs, the tunes her grandmother sang — set for solo cello, published one at a time as they are finished, and gathered on her album Komoriuta. The arrangements began as encores and are now the reason people come.
She plays a cello by Anton Weiss, Vienna 1911, on generous loan from the Ashgrove Trust — an instrument with a low string she describes as the colour of miso, which is a compliment.
Programmes and plays a July weekend of concerts in a hay meadow above the River Windrush — no stage, no amplification, blankets instead of seats, and the interval timed to the light.
Brahms — Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38
Mori — Three Songs from Kumamoto
Franck — Sonata in A, arranged for cello
with Agnes Weir, piano
Bach — Suite No. 1 in G, BWV 1007
Kanade Mori — arrangements from Komoriuta
Bring a blanket; the music starts when the swifts do. Free for under-12s.
Harrogate Autumn Series Postponed
Elgar — Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
Postponed to the spring while the hall's organ restoration finishes — new date to follow.
Cardiff Lunchtime Concerts
Kodály — Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8
Grantham Recital Club
Beethoven — Sonata No. 3 in A, Op. 69
Mori — Akatombo
with Agnes Weir, piano
Concert programme — Grantham recital (PDF)
“Mori and Weir played the Beethoven as a conversation between old friends who still surprise each other — and the Akatombo encore silenced a room that had been reaching for its coats.”
The Lincolnshire Herald, recital with Agnes Weir, Grantham
The album programme, played whole, in order
The Meadow Recitals — second season
Bach — Suites Nos. 2 & 3
Songs, as the light allowed
Tokyo recital debut
Brahms — Sonata No. 2 in F, Op. 99
Mori — Itsuki Lullaby
with Agnes Weir, piano
The first arrangement to leave the encore slot and hold a programme on its own: the melody set low on the C string, the famous outline barely touched, everything happening in what surrounds it.
A lullaby from Kyushu, sung by children hired out as nursemaids — a working song about being far from home, which is why it opens the album and why it is played last at the meadow.
The songs of her home prefecture, set for the duo with Agnes Weir — still growing; a fourth is on the stand. First recorded on Komoriuta.
A column about playing outdoors: what wind does to bow hair, what an audience on blankets hears that an audience in rows doesn't, and why the swifts always come in during Bach.
Bellfound Records, May 2025
Kanade Mori, cello
Eleven Japanese songs — lullabies, school songs, one her grandmother sang while hanging washing — arranged for solo cello and recorded at first light in a wooden chapel, windows open. The record the arrangements were always heading towards.
Songs
Itsuki Lullaby
Sakura Sakura
Akatombo (Red Dragonfly)
Hamabe no Uta (Song of the Seashore)
Furusato
Mori — Three Songs from Kumamoto (first recording)
Editor's Choice — The Bow
“Komoriuta does the rarest thing an arrangements record can do: it makes the cello sound like the songs' first language rather than their translator.” ★★★★★
The Bow, on Komoriuta
Bellfound Records, September 2023
Kanade Mori, cello
The first three suites, recorded in the resonant quiet of a decommissioned reservoir — Bach with the long echo the meadow taught her to wait for.
“Her Bach is unhurried without being slow: the suites played the way light moves across a field.” ★★★★
Gramophone Notes, on the Bach suites
Photography by Tam Okabe
Sofia Brandt
Quill & Stave Artists
14 Palliser Yard
London SE1 3GH
