“No matter what, I know I would keep playing.” Cameron Renshaw, 11, performs with the Cape Symphony this weekend.
Cameron Renshaw emulates Yo-Yo Ma: “I want to be just like him.”
The young cellist is off to a good start.
Renshaw, an 11-year-old musical prodigy from Michigan, will join the Cape Symphony this weekend in a program entitled Forever Young. The concerts, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, are meant to recall everyone’s first experiences with classical music. The performances will include introductory favorites like Saint-Saëns’s “Carnival of the Animals” and Dukas’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
For Cameron, who will play a virtuosic cello showpiece, Popper’s “Tarantella,” it’s a continuation of the path he’s already been following for half his life. When he was 5, Cameron’s mother pulled her unused cello out of the closet. “I thought it was cool, and I loved the sound,” he says. He started playing soon after, and when he completed the first Suzuki book, “that’s when I started getting more serious, and actually believing.”
People started noticing, as he puts it. That beginning led to a whirlwind of competition victories and performances—with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, on the Ellen Degeneres Show, at New York’s Carnegie Hall and at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. And brought him to the attention of the Cape Symphony’s music director Jung-Ho Pak, who “wanted an actual kid on the program,” Cameron says.
Now a 6th grader at Nickels Intermediate School in Byron Center, MI, Cameron takes lessons at the university level with cellist Pablo Mahave-Veglia. He also studies recordings and videos of great cellists, like his beloved Yo-Yo Ma—“I listen to his recording of ‘The Swan’ over and over”—and earlier performers like Janos Starker.
“I look at the way they move, to try to get their tempo and pitch, but also to see how to express yourself,” he says.
Music-making is part of the family. His mother Tina—whose neglected cello started it all—studied at Indiana University. Cameron plays duets with a cousin, and has a violin-playing younger brother Parker as well. His 6th grade friends seem to take Cameron’s accomplishments in stride—“they’re cool with my cello playing,” he says. “I love music, I love to travel, and I love playing for people. No matter what, I know I would keep playing.”
Along with his precocious facility for the cello, Cameron is a synesthete—one of those few people who see specific colors when they hear sounds. “When I play sad music, it’s dark blue, or purple,” he says. “When the music is faster, I see green and orange. It’s impressionistic.”
Not everyone has Cameron Renshaw’s breadth of youthful talent, but everyone who loves music has had some experience that created lasting memories. In keeping with the spirit of the Cape Symphony’s Forever Young program, children ages six to 18 get free entry.
The program also includes Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Pianists Ana Glig and James Rosenblum are featured soloists in “Carnival of the Animals.”