Who’s afraid of new music? Not Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the rock-star cellist from the U.K. In 2022, his hit album Song featured as its centerpiece the five-movement Preludes of Edmund Finnis, inspiring critics to wax poetic at Finnis’s lyricism and iridescence. (More clinically, the soloist judged the score “distinctive in character and perfectly written for the cello.”) At his concerts with the LA Phil, Kanneh-Mason now introduces a new Finnis cello concerto. As a curtain-raiser, Roberto González-Monjas has chosen the genial Theme and Variations of Erich Korngold—wunderkind, refugee from the Nazis, elective Angeleno, and founding father of the Hollywood film score as practiced by successive generations to this day. Edward Elgar’s imposing Enigma Variations brings the program to an uplifting close. Depending on individual sensibilities, a listener may flash on Tristan und Isolde (for Elgar’s Wagnerian chromaticisms) or the novels of Virginia Woolf (for the probing character sketches). —Matthew Gurewitsch