Kanne-Mason's debut album is full of rich delights

Inspiration

Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Decca

It’s two years since cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason made history as the first black musician to win the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year and we now have the opportunity to listen to the first recording of his contract with Decca.

Still in his teens and, having completed his A’ levels, now a student at the Royal Academy of Music, he has been working with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and music director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla for his debut album.

Recorded in Birmingham and Kanneh-Mason’s hometown of Nottingham during two concerts with the orchestra, both conducted by Gražinytė-Tyla, the album features Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No1 – the piece that propelled him to the Young Musician title.

It sits at the heart of the programme, immediately preceded by the Nocturne from the same composer’s Gadfly Suite.

If the Shostakovich is the meat in the sandwich – and it’s every bit as good as one would expect – there’s plenty more here to give listeners a sense of just what heights Kanneh-Mason is already hitting.

The most famous piece is The Swan from Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of Animals – simply beautiful playing of this lush, romantic icon; the phrasing is exquisite.

And then there is Song of the Birds. This traditional Catalan song was arranged for the instrument by the legendary Catalan cellist Pablo Casals and often played by him at the start of a concert to protest against the fascist regime of Franco in Spain.

There is an astonishing sense of emotion here; never heavy-handed – indeed, there is lightness to Kanneh-Mason’s playing that is breathtaking on occasion.

Then, on the other side of the Shostakovich, comes the beautifully lyrical Jacqueline’s Tears from Harmonies des bois by Offenbach, himself a cellist, and a reminder that the composer was not just capable of feather-light operetta. Then it’s back to Casals with his Sardana – a setting for the Catalonian national dance.

The album rounds off with arrangements for cello of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – the latter in particular works superbly.

If this sounds like a somewhat disjointed programme, it’s far from it. Underpinned by a poignant and reflective tone that helps span the musical eras and styles, it all comes together to provide the basis for an astonishingly fine debut from Kanne-Mason.

It really is not difficult to see why his name is being mentioned in the same breath as that of Jaqueline Du Pre.

Joie de vivre at the chateau

Visiting new places has a thrill all of its own. But there are also pleasures to returning to somewhere that you’ve been before; to learning more about it, experiencing more, growing to know it more.

On previous visits to Collioure, we’ve never really come away with any musical impressions. But this trip produced more than one musical experience.

The first came courtesy of Hot Club de Torderes – or at least, three of their full line-up of six.

Lola Lesné (clarinet and vocals), Jacques-Emmanuel Ricard (guitar and vocals) and Victor Badze (guitar and mandoline) were playing at the market on our middle Wednesday.

After standing around to listen for a while, I picked up a CD for €10. They play an enjoyable mix of “jazz/latin/swing” and the disc has been our dining music since our return.

You can find out more at their myspace site, here.

But on our last day, as the holiday seemed to be tapering toward a slightly gloomy anti-climax, we headed up to the chateau, having seen adverts for a day of Catalan music and fun.

We had little idea of what to expect and assumed that it was pretty much an end-of-summer party.

Well, it was to an extent. The event – Els Ben Parits – was also organised in conjunction with Les Restaurants du Coeur, a regional charity as a fundraiser.

Not that anyone was using that as an excuse to rake in the cash. Admission was €10 and you had a stamp on your wrist so that you could come and go as you wanted (it was something like a 10-hour event). We bought souvenir plastic cups with lanyards to hang around your neck – after that, a portion of food was €1 and a half of beer was €2, although the latter was reduced when the man serving it decided that it was getting a little flat.

The food was extraordinary – slabs of bread with tomato on them (a local speciality) and topped with huge anchovies. Massive boxes were repeatedly carried in, full of pissadadiere , the regions own version of a Provencal, pizza-like dish with a doughy base, a covering of tomato and then a diagonal design of anchovies, with some carefully placed black olives; more slabs of bread with local sausages …

You can do fast food without it being junk.

And you can raise money without ripping people off and economically excluding many.

With food and drink, we perched ourselves on a staircase with a decent view of the stage.

After a wait, we were introduced to L’Agram – one ebay seller describes an early album of theirs as “French-Occitan-folk-psych-prog”, which is a genre I can’t say I’ve come across before.

A sizeable outfit with three singers: one, a middle-aged man with a shock of white hair; then a delightfully curvaceous younger woman and a bird of a woman, of indeterminate age, who has bags of energy, dresses in wonderfully eccentric fashion and reminds me of a sort of cross between Su Pollard and Terrence Stamp in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

All had their individual turn at the mic as well as taking singing together on some songs. But it was the latter who most strongly struck me.

In France, chanson simply means ‘song’. In the UK, we tend to think of it as a specific genre, with Piaf as the apotheosis of the style.

My birdlike singer, with her red trilby and her red glasses, can perform just such songs, wonderfully, with an earthy, robust quality.

But my favourite song from their set, which had The Other Half in stitches, was about making aioli, complete with actions to illustrate the stirring required. What a way to celebrate a wonderful regional delicacy!

As the group emerged from the back of the stage after their set, I managed to speak to the birdlike singer and ask if they had any CDs. She didn’t seem sure, so she led me to the front row of the raked seating that had been erected in front of the stage. There, I was introduced to another woman, to who I asked the same question. Helpfully, given my poor French, she could speak English.

She then brought three more women into the conversation. They were utterly fascinated that someone from London would want local music. Which in turn became a four-way conversation about exactly what, of L’Agram’s repertoire, constituted ‘traditional’ local music.

Eventually, the decided that they could get together two CDs and would send them to me. They found paper and a pen for me to write down my address, but refused payment, saying I could send that when the CDs arrive.

They were friendly and helpful – and it didn’t appear to occur to them to be suspicious that someone might not send any cash. Their generosity of spirit was wonderful. I’m looking forward to any post from France – but I know perfectly well that it might take some time.

The next act was Les Madeleines, described on the event leaflet as “ambiance guinguette”. Now ambiance means in French pretty much what it means in English, while guinguette is apparently a small café where live music is played.

Trust the French to have one word to say all that!

Also a large group, they turned out to be a sort of anarchic jazz punk combo, with occasional bits of politics thrown in, led by another small woman with insane amounts of energy and a mad accordionist.

Bonkers. Completely bonkers. And utterly fabulous. For their second song, the woman invited people to dance a sardane, a Catalan dance, where people join in circles. There are proper steps, and it traditionally goes from a sedate pace to a frenetic one. We’d first seen it danced earlier in this stay, when we saw some sort of party taking place in the open.

This was a bit different and turned into something a little closer to a conga, followed by a hokey cokey. Dust kicked up by scores of dancing feet; laughter and an intoxicating sense of community. And the energy; the boisterous good spirits; the sheer joie de vivre ... It was infectious and completely life-affirming.

Where other acts had left the stage when their set time was over, Les Madeleines ignored the gestures of the MC (who looked like a despairing Sgt Bilko) and set off on a crazy, musical whirlwind of an encore that lasted something like 15 minutes and left us feeling delightedly breathless.

And there was no sense of anti-climax left in sight.

To get a bit of the flavour, you can find Les Madeleines on myspace too, by clicking here.

Rugby League changed my life

I like Rugby League. No, it isn't my favourite sport, but it's one I enjoy – and I've certainly got a lot to be grateful to it for.

It was three years ago Easter just gone that St Helens and Castleford Tigers played their first Super League matches against the then newcomers to the competition, the Catalans Dragons. And since there was barely more than a week between those two visits to the south of France, The Other Half and I decided to arrange our main holiday of the year around the games.

Travel on the Friday, watch the Dragons v Cas in Carcassonne on the Saturday, then travel to Barcelona for a week on the Sunday and back to Perpignan on the Easter Sunday for Saints' visit on the Monday, followed by a TGV journey to Paris and then home 36 hours later via the Eurostar.

It was to be a revelation of a trip – possibly even a trip that was life-changing.

Rugby League is, in essence, a working class sport. It split from 'rugby' in 1895, after the powers that be, based in the south of England, created a by-law to stop northern clubs in working-class districts paying their players 'broken-time' money, to compensate them for the wages that they lost when they took breaks from their jobs in the mills and mines to play.

Outside the north, players came from a different background and didn't suffer financially through playing. Thus was born Rugby League – the other code is Rugby Union, which only became openly professional around 15 years ago. They found plenty of ways to pay players via the back door over the years – thus it was known as 'shamateurism'.

But it's also an illustration, generally, of why amateurism in sport is elistist.

In France, the sport suffered miserably at the hands of the ruling elite – not least during the war years, when the Vichy government actually banned it and stripped clubs of all their assets. The French RL is still campaigning for official recognition of the wrongs done to the sport – and for some sort of compensation.

The introduction of the Dragons into Super League was not without controversy – plenty of fans in England didn't want them. But it was a major chance to help build RL in the part of France that had once been the heartland of the country's game.

And so we made our first trip to southern Europe.

Downside? Having to fly out by Ryan Air. Which I hate. But Perpignan airport is a small one and you have that wonderful experience of walking across the tarmac to the airport buildings themselves. Heat welcomed us, together with the sight of the Pyrenees, rearing up on the horizon.

That night, we joined other fans in a short bus trip to nearby St Esteve. A small town, we'd been invited to visit the Rugby League clubhouse, where a barbeque had been arranged. It was a most convivial evening.

Saturday's match was an evening one, to which we would travel by coach. In the morning, therefore, we joined a minibus to take a tour of the coast. As we headed down the motorway, toward the mountains, the conversation from our fellow explorers was most illuminating.

"We got to the hotel yesterday," said a male Yorkshire voice. "And the receptionist said: 'Bonjour'. And I said: 'Hello'. And she said: 'Bonjour'. And I said: 'Hello'. And eventually she got the idea and said: 'Hello'."

Oh, what a victory for perfidious Albion.

Then one of the women traveling in their little group: "I mean, it's very nice, but it's not a real Rugby League town."

No – it's not in the bleak industrial north of England, where manufacturing is all but dead and the towns are dying dumps.

Our first stop, winding down a hairpin road, was Collioure. We had an hour – and in that time, we were well on the way to falling in love, wandering along the seafront, gaping at the menus of all the restaurants and at the view in general.

Our fellow travelers, it should be noted, didn't bother looking around, but simply headed to the first bar that was open.

Then on to Argelès sur Mer, slightly further back up the coast. We had a little longer and, while the others headed straight for another bar, we ambled to the seafront, dipped our feet in the Mediterranean for the first time and basked in the spring sunshine. A couple of the seafront restaurants were already open for business and, while looking at the menu of one, the waiter drew us in. Not that there was much "in". The tables were set out on a deck, but the canopy overhead had been drawn back and we sat with the sun burnishing our skin and penetrating to cold, northern bones, drinking sangrias that came compliments of the restaurant for being two of the very first customers of the new season.

The Other Half had a spaghetti carbonara. I had huge gambas, shells blackened on the fire and served in warmed olive oil, infused with garlic. Within seconds, I'd given up any remote efforts to be 'ladylike', getting my fingers as greasy as possible as I tore off the shells and relished the firm, tasty meat of the vast prawns, and the flavour of the oil. TV chef Rick Stein, on a culinary trip through France, once commented that, in England, he'd seen people try to eat such food with a knife and fork. You can't. It demands to be handled – and such an earthy approach is wonderfully sensual.

The third and final stop on our little tour was Canet. It took us only a very few moments to decide that we won't bother going back there: an artificial creation of high-rise, concrete hotels and 'trendy' bars, it was far from the sort of place that we like. The others thought it brilliant – and found a bar straight away.

The next day, after a match that had seen Cas lose, we caught a train south. It was a long, slow journey in a very basic train, and by the time we reached Barcelona, it was evening and we didn't feel like venturing far from the hotel.

The next day, however, was a peach, with visits to Sagrada Família and then on to Las Ramblas, where we peeked just inside La Boqueria, one of the most famous markets in the world, and then relished a sumptuous lunch in a restaurant right next to the market. I had deep fried squid to start, followed by bacalao, cooked in a an unbelievable amount of olive oil, with peppers and garlic by the ton, and all served in the pan. Wonderful. And accompanied by a gutsy Tempranillo – The Other Half asked for the house red and the waiter brought a bottle and poured us each a little, with his towel obscuring the label.

"Tempranillo, si?" I managed. He was impressed. The Other Half was even more impressed. It's possibly the only wine in the world that I can recognise. I felt chuffed.

But that gives you an idea of what was to become one of the dominant features of that week – the food. A wonderful restaurant down the road from our hotel, Els Barrils, specialised in Galacian-style fish. I had padron peppers as a starter – lovely little jewels of green peppers, around 4.5cm long; they're fried very quickly and then served with a garnish of course sea salt. You pick them up by the stem to eat, and about one in 10 packs a serious pepper punch. They're delicious. I followed that with my very first lobster, and then a lovely chocolate and orange icecream for dessert.

Moon became a regular late-evening venue after walking off dinner, with good beers and tapas for the really hungry.

There was another restaurant where the young waiter was trying to open our bottle of wine and the cork broke inside the bottle. The maître d came over, and in a dumb show of pure comic genius, rolled his eyes, gave us complimentary tapas as a starter (little black puddings) and then, when he'd produced a new bottle of wine, rolled it slowly and with great drama on our table to help him ease the cork out. Later, he insisted on my having a complimentary dessert too – as though they had anything to apologise for. And the food itself ...

I had bacalao again, but this time in a sauce of honey and pine nuts. Fabulous.

At yet another restaurant – a very smart and modern one – I had the mesclun salad, with strawberries and nuts, followed by caramcitas – baby squid, perfectly cooked, the ivory pockets arranged like a star on my plate, and dressed with warmed olive oil, infused with garlic.

A few days later, in Paris for the first time, I had a wonderful pave of salmon, served with a small ratatouille and new potatoes, and followed by a dreamy crème brûlée that had me oozing 'tres bons' to the waiter.

Just over three years have since that expedition, but I remember those meals as though it were yesterday. I don't have to think hard to recall them or even refer to the diary in which I noted them in detail at the time. In Barcelona in particular, I found the most wonderful food that I had ever eaten.

Food that was full of colour, bursting with freshness and flavour. Perfect ingredients, wonderful simplicity. Meals that were so balanced and perfectly proportioned that even I – who normally can hardly manage two courses in the UK – could eat a full three. Eating had drama about it, and pleasure and pride for those who cooked and served it as well as the pleasure of those who ate.

We've spent a further week in Barcelona since, and visited at least three of those eateries again (Els Barrils twice more, while I ate exactly the same salad and squid at that restaurant as 18 months earlier). And then last year, in desperate need of a total break, we spent 10 days in Collioure. The food, again, was bliss.

We will return this September for a fortnight, staying not in a hotel this time, but in a cottage. I have always derided self-catering – my mother could turn it into a nightmare. But now – now, I am going to be able to shop and to cook in France. I'm already excited.

So no, given my tastes and how they've developed even since then, I don't think it's too much to say that that trip was a life changer.

So thank you Rugby League.

Sun, sea and salt

The sun on your skin has to be one of the most sensual experiences ever. Warmth in the air and salt on the sea breeze. Gulls wheel above, flying and shrieking as though out of nothing but joy.

A friend sent me some extracts from Mark Kurkansky’s excellent Salt: a world history this morning, and managed to turn my mind straight away to the south of France; to Languedoc-Roussillon, to the Mediterranean coast, to the vast salt pans visible from plane or train and, most of all, to Collioure.

The little port, nestling below the Pyrénées, has two claims to fame: anchovies and art. The art in question is Fauvism – Matisse thought the light there the most beautiful in the world. The little fish were integral to the village’s economy; salted and dispatched to various parts of the world, valued as the finest anchovies anywhere.

Just reading about it made me long to be back there. The pebbled beaches leave the Mediterranean crystal clear. Venture in and fish will soon be swimming around your legs. Don a snorkel and goggles and float, face down, gazing into a different world; a world where sunlight, refracted through the water, glistens all around.

Keep your eyes open and watch: spot the tiniest of lifeforms shifting around in their shells; creatures scooting out of sight behind rocks as the seabed falls away and weeds sway languorously below. Daurade as big as dinner plate and busy shoals of multi-coloured smaller fish go about their business.

Stay still: let your body stop. And just watch.

Wander along the narrow, winding streets of brightly painted houses: admire the art – there’s plenty of it. Sit at any one of the seafront cafés and watch the world go by. Banish any timepieces.

Lunch on anchovies and olives, or sardines charred on an open grill right next to the beach and stuffed between bread with the fingers. Dine on squid dipped into unctuous aïoli or tuna with ripe tomatoes and fresh bread dipped into virgin oil, squeezed from the groves on the surrounding hills. Drink the sweet, local Banyuls to start, before moving on to a carafe of the house rosé. Perfection in simplicity.

Relax and let the place rub away all the stress and the tensions of modern living. And still the sun; blissfully hot, caressing the skin; the water, lapping the shore, and the blue, blue sky overhead.

The end of February nears. It’s still chilly in London, although milder than for some weeks. Time for winter to end. I need the sun on my back and the salt in my nostrils again.