Mansur Kadirov is a cellist trained across three countries. Originally from Uzbekistan, his path has taken him from singing as a child to studying under some of classical music’s most respected teachers in Canada and the United States.
By Myia Lela Hamed
There’s a moment Mansur Kadirov keeps returning to, though it isn’t his own. It’s a memory of watching his professor, Daniel Veis, perform. “I didn’t feel like he was simply playing the cello,” he says. “I felt like I was hearing pure music, like it could have been expressed through any instrument at all.” Present-day Kadirov still measures his own playing against that standard.
Long before Professor Veis, though, his mother shaped him. As a musician herself, she was his first teacher, and singing was the language of the house he grew up in. He compares the cello “to the human voice, explaining how he “felt like [he] could continue singing through it.” The cellist didn’t think of it as picking up a new instrument, but more like his voice had simply found a new method of expression.
By his teenage years, something about the cello had opened a kind of space for him. The instrument allowed him to be understood without verbally having to explain himself. “It gave me a sense of freedom,” he says. Somewhere in that stretch of time, music stopped being something he was raised with and became something he chose for himself.
His training since has crossed three countries. Born in Uzbekistan, he studied in Canada and later the United States, absorbing something different from each teacher along the way. From Veis, Hans Jørgen Jensen, and Horacio Contreras, every single mentor left a mark on how he approaches the instrument.
Regardless of his many mentors, building a music career has its difficulties, although Kadirov frames it through a different lens. “I don’t really think there’s a hardest part, if you truly love what you do,” he says. It’s not that the work has been easy, rather that he doesn’t file the hard parts under complaint, but instead as motivation.
That attitude shows up in how he practices, too, which is to say without much of a fixed structure at all. His schedule is dictated by whatever piece needs the most attention that week. During that time of practice, the cellist begins forming an opinion on what the piece means to him. “I think about how I want to deliver the idea and character of the piece to the audience,” he says. “The most important thing is communicating the music honestly.” This goal centers his practices and performances.
Asked which piece feels most personal to him, he resists picking a favorite. Whatever he’s currently learning gets pulled apart and studied until it means something to him specifically. Once this opinion is formed, he knows how to communicate that piece to his audience. Personal, in his case, isn’t a quality a piece arrives with. It’s something he builds into it.
What he hopes people take away is straightforward: that they hear the composer clearly, and that they leave curious enough to seek out more of that composer’s work. He isn’t after recognition for himself so much as being the middleman for someone else to experience that piece of music.
Ahead, his plans sound less like ambition and more like continuation: keep improving, and start teaching more seriously, handing down what Veis and his other mentors gave him. Asked what he’d tell himself if he were just starting, his answer comes without hesitation. “Learn as much new repertoire as possible,” he says. “Every new piece gives you something to learn.”
It’s advice he seems to be following himself, one piece at a time.
Mansur Kadirov along with Dr. Christina Ivanova-Wright will perform at the American University of Sharjah on Oct. 3. For more details on this and upcoming events, please check Engage Arts at AUS: https://www.aus.edu/life-at-aus/vibrant-cultural-offerings
