TWO years ago, at the age of 16, Sheku Kanneh-Mason became the BBC Young Musician of the Year. He has already reached something close to superstar status. He is undoubtedly a huge talent, with massive potential, but it remains potential.

Indeed, I fear for him. He played to his image ratHow gooher than the music in front of him (which, to his credit, he hardly needed to consult). Technically adroit, the gestures all in place, he injected very little soul into his bow. The contrast with his pianist sister Isata, three years his elder, was marked.

In a nicely eclectic mix of sonatas, by Boccherini, Poulenc, Debussy and Brahms, the early signs were good. His ornamentation in a Boccherini adagio was taut, if mechanical, but the subsequent allegros were nondescript.

Poulenc’s only sonata is bitty. But Sheku remained nonchalant, unconvincing in its puckish key changes, though with tantalising glimpses of sotto voce in the slow movement. He forsook opportunities offered by Isata to engage in dialogue, forgetting perhaps that this was a duo, not a solo, recital.

In Debussy, there were too many hard edges where we needed velvet in his tone. He was similarly pugnacious in Brahms’s Second Sonata, where the concept of romanticism largely eluded him. There were fireworks aplenty when he should have been accompanying, not leading. Isata, in contrast, was deeply intelligent, shading beautifully. He could learn a lot from her.