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.

Lichtenstein at the Tate Liverpool joins all the dots

In the Car (1963) Oil paint and magma on canvas

Whenever work sends me away from home for a day or so, one of the first considerations is food. Hot on its heels comes the question of whether there is any art to be hunted down.

Thus a working weekend in Liverpool instantly meant two things: at least one visit to the Docklands Fish & Chips for lunch and a look at what was on at the Tate Liverpool, which is just along the same stretch of the Albert Dock – both no distance from the conference centre where I’m working.

Arriving yesterday in mid-afternoon, a quick lunch saw me choose scampi and chips – served in a box with mushy peas, sliced lettuce, gherkins and silverskin pickled onions. I’m not convinced by this approach, so today I made a point of asking for just battered cod, two potato scallops and mushy peas.

Reflections: Art

If yesterday’s wasn’t bad, this was much better. The chips are not sensational – I still remember a fish ‘n’ chip lunch to die for in Scarborough in 2011, where the chips were double-fried properly, in front of us, in dripping – then today’s fish was absolutely superb.

And the service is as warm and friendly as you would expect north of Watford Gap.

So, what of the art?

Tate Liverpool is 30 years old this year and it’s staging a major show by Fernand Léger, together with one that pairs works by Egon Schiele and Francesca Woodman to examine nudes and self portraiture.

Water Lily Pond with Reflections

At present, however, the main exhibition is work by the British artist John Piper. However, there is also a concise, two-room show by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Perfect for the time-strapped and free to boot.

Having not actually seen any Lichtenstein in the ‘flesh’ – and probably because one unthinkingly knows that a comic fits in your hand easily – I hadn’t even given much though to the scale of Lichtenstein’s works or, indeed, to the mixture of media and techniques that he used.

These are big pieces – and when you realise the precision that is key to them, it’s hardly surprising. But the variety of techniques, from print-making to working with all sorts of media on canvas, to mass-produced ceramics, is the real eye opener.

Sea Shore

For instance, in Reflections: Art from 1988, we get oil and acrylic on canvas. Pretty conventional, really. But then Sunrise (1965) is porcelain enamel on steel and Sea Shore (1964) is oil paint and magma on plexiglass, while Seascape from the following year is screenprint and paper on plastic.

Then there is Water Lily Pond with Reflections (1992), a screenprint on enamel on stainless steel.

Together with Water Lillies with Cloud from the same year – it was a series of six made in collaboration with master printmaker Donald Saff – it’s impossible not to think back to Monet. Indeed, a series of four haystacks prints takes us directly there.

Seascape

Yet part of the pleasure here is in seeing the links to the past, but in conjunction with Lichtenstein’s extraordinary mastery of such a range of modern materials. And he used those materials to gain specific effects that actually add to the work, rather than simply as some sort of art geek’s technical exercises.

After moving from comic-style works to landscape and a video installation, we come full circle to finish the two rooms with Wall Explosion II (1965), executed in enamel on steel – in many ways, a work that epitomises the power that this incredibly concise exhibition packs: not everything needs to be so vast as to exhaust.

Wall Explosion II

Mixing some of these iconic comic-style works with less-expected landscapes makes for fascinating viewing.

Indeed, such is the familiarity of the comic-book images that I suspect many people scarcely even begin to imagine that Lichtenstein did anything much else.

It’s very much the case that, while those comic works are a very long way from being disappointing, the landscapes are the revelation and the unexpected delight that you come away with.

The Roy Lichtenstein artist rooms are open at Tate Liverpool until 17 June 2018

The RSC's Caesar was a dish fit for the gods

It was a plain classroom with traditional, simple desks that still had a place for an inkwell. It was the mid-1970s and it was my second year at Fairfield, a state grammar school for girls that stands just up the road from where Manchester City strut their stuff now.

The school is linked to an historic Moravian settlement – at least 75% of the reason that my rather religious parents decided to send me as far again as far as the nearest grammar school (in Ashton) when I passed my 11+.

The other reason was that Ashton was co-ed. Fairfield just had 800 girls in those days. By way of further colour, they were either football or speedway fans – Belle Vue speedway was not far away, but it the former, then obviously either City of or the mob from Salford.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been a Blue since around 1974.

Anyway, it was my second year. We had been introduced to Shakespeare via the traditional route of The Dream – because … y’know … fairies, lurve etc (nothing to do with Titania lusting after someone who has been turned into an animal that the first audiences would easily have known had a whopping penis – thanks to Jill Betjeman’s doctoral thesis for this coming to my attention some years ago) and after that, it was Julius Caesar.

I remember the books: small hardbacks, annotated by generations of pupils. Years later, I started buying the Arden texts because they actually provided contextual essays and serious notes. You possibly don’t want to get me started on Merchant.

The lessons are remembered in a general sense – the teacher would ‘cast’ the characters for the next section and we would read before analysing. Since I had already shown a certain flair for reading aloud/acting, I was usually quite pleasantly busy.

Later, we did Romeo and Juliet. I seemed to be the only one in the class that hated it (I still dislike it, even having seen the seriously memorable Michael Bogdanov 1986 RSC production at Stratford with Sean ‘One-Note’ Bean, Niamh Cusack and a fabulous, black leather-clad Hugh Quarshie – lust alert – as Tybalt).

However, in the case of old Julie, I was the only one who seemed to care for the play.

So, fast forward 40-plus years. The RSC were bringing their Roman season to the Barbican and both The Other Half and I wanted to see at least two and, if we could, the whole batch.

In the event, since I ended up spending November and December dealing with serious family problems, we hadn’t even got around to booking by the time 2017 morphed into 2018. Then, just over a week ago, an alarm bell sounded in my head and I looked at whether it was still possible to get in for anything.

Remarkably, with just a couple of performances to go for the entire season, I was able to get tickets for Julius Caesar.

Subsequently, I have read a number of reviews. It’s an odd occasion where I find myself aligned with the Guardian’s Michael Billington (stopped clocks ‘n’ all). But most were, in my opinion, really quite stupid. For instance, more than one seemed to doubt that theatre audiences are clever enough to catch the modern relevance of the play – unless it’s done in contemporary dress with posters of Trump plastered all over the set!

Now it might be that I’m *so* much more intelligent than most people in this country that I do not need to have such literal signposts – or perhaps not. But I certainly had no problem seeing the relevance, for all it’s classical Roman setting.

Other reviews whined that Alex Waldmann’s Brutus isn’t, y’know, heroic enough. He doubts, he wavers – and then he rushes at it all like a naive fundamentalist. Disagree with this interpretation by all means, but it is nonetheless a valid and very interesting one.

Personally, finally seeing the play on stage, so long after loving it so much at school … I thought that it was an exceptional production that brought home to me just how very good this play is in the first place.

As with Macbeth, Shakespeare absolutely ‘got’ politics and the behaviour that goes with it. There are no obvious ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ – even those who see the tyranny of Caesar are not themselves immune from behaving in a way that is dictatorial.

I utterly adored seeing this done in Roman dress – the first time I’ve seen a play like this done in such historic dress. I have no problem with modern-dress productions – but I thought this was wonderful. I love the sort of set that Robert Innes Hopkins gave us: simple, yet sophisticated.

Angus Jackson’s production was, for me, one of the best things I’ve seen in a very long time – and it brought home to me just what a truly great play this is. My teenage self was not wrong.

Martin Hutson – simply superb as Cassius

On the cast, while Waldmann’s Brutus does challenge our preconceptions of the character, it is a far, far better performance than some reviews would lead you to believe. Hannah Morrish (in her debut RSC season) is wonderful in her brief time on stage as Portia, Andrew Woodall’s Caesar is an excellent study of a supercilious despot, his Bill Nighy-like spit-lisp utterly spot on, while  James Corrigan as Mark Antony is superb – not least in wooing the mob with the oratory of the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, ending as it does when he rips up the fake will that he has used to rouse the crowd.

The ensemble cast was excellent. But the star performance really does come from Martin Hutson as Cassius – simply stunning.

One of the joys of this is that there were no simplistic ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. Every single character is flawed. And by the end, it's hard to know who you sympathise with – or not. Indeed, I felt that Cassius comes out of it with rather more integrity than others.

For various reasons, I haven’t seen the RSC for around 20 years. This reminded me why it is such a great company, why Shakespeare is still so relevant – and why Julius Caesar is such a sensationally good play.

Cézanne's questioning gaze is the challenge

Self-Portrait with Bowler Hat (1885-86)

How do we view Cézanne? In a review of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of his portraiture, the Evening Standard declared that he had no relevance to art today. This is, of course, arrant nonsense – if we were only to take the example of his influence on Matisse and then consider Matisse’s continuing influence on art, then we can see it as a piece of empty provocation.

Yet however indignantly one might reject such an assertion, there is something oddly flat about this exhibition.

That could be because it opened last year to almost universally hysterical praise and simply cannot live up to the hype.

A number of the works appear unfinished – perhaps even careless. Cézanne’s sense of proportion is, on occasion, absurd. Though I must confess that, just as with the Picasso portraits in the same rooms early last year, it is a marvellous thing for any art practitioner to see that famous artists didn’t always find it easy to paint hands!

Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair

It’s possible that, thinking of the Provencal sun, I had expected a riot of colour and the sharp contrasts between light and shade that one finds in southern Europe.

But Cézanne’s palette is incredibly restrained. Ironically, given such an expectation, this limited palette was actually one of the most fascinating things about the show.

Blue and blue-greens dominate. And the tones of green that the artist used on faces – Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) is a perfect example – instantly brings to mind The Green Line (or Portrait of Madame Matisse) that Matisse painted in 1905 to huge consternation.

It’s worth remembering that Matisse was ahead of his time in recognising Cézanne – he bought Three Bathers (1879-82) at great personal cost in 1899 and carried it with him as a talisman for years, before donating it to the Museum of the City of Paris in 1936.

Three almost identical portraits of Madame Cézanne wife hang here – reunited for the first time in a century, but only serving to give a sense of at least one not really being finished.

The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evénement

The show opens with The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evénement from 1866, which is wonderful – not least because of the less obvious things involved.

The newspaper had originally been Le Siècle (a republican but not revolutionary paper), but Cézanne changed that to L’Evénement – a more radical publication that had a particularly caustic art critic, who turned out to be Cézanne’s old friend and sparring partner, Zola.

Alex Danchev, in his Cézanne: A life (2013), points out that it was part of a lifetime conversation between the two.

And the artist son also makes a little point about his relationship with his father by including a painting of his own behind the chair. 

Of interest is Portrait of Paul Cézanne (1862-64), painted from a photograph of the artist himself at the age of 22, which has a fierce quality that contrasts hugely with the questioning expression that is a regular feature in so many later self portraits, including a pair from 1875, Self-Portrait with a Landscape Background and Self-Portrait with Rose Background (the latter of which looks like Clement Freud).

Old Woman with a Rosary 

In another room, we have two more self-portraits – this time, both show the artist wearing a bowler hat. Again, the look is quizzical and seems to challenge the impertinence of the viewer in a way the portraits of other people never seem to do.

Woman With a Coffee Pot (1895) is striking, but more striking yet is Old Woman with a Rosary (1895-96), with light that nods to Rembrandt and a treatment of his subject that conveys real emotion.

My most substantial previous exposure to Cézanne had been at the Courtauld, which has lent this exhibition Man With a Pipe (c1896). Yet for all that it is largely executed in a palette of browns, Cézanne here gives his subject light – dappled light on the hat and coat.

And in The Gardener Vallier (1905-06), one of his last works, there are finally the brights and the light and shade one might have expected.

Much to consider and take away for further mulling, even if nothing quite leaves you with a sense of awe.

Not that anything is ever helped by curator’s notes that seem aimed directly at winning a place in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner – the explanation for Old Woman with a Rosary waffled on about the artist using colour to show volume, with “lozonge-shaped” slabs of colour being like “a map”. No. Just no.

But perhaps what most feels disjointed here is the contrast – or even the conflict – between the more naturalistic portraits and mask-like ones; we flit between the two through Cézanne’s career.

The self-portraits are, as a group, among the strongest works on display – precisely because they veer to the more naturalistic and because of that gaze.

Never mind how we view Cézanne – this exhibition seems to be more about how the artist makes us think about ourselves when we train our own gaze on another person and, in this age of the ‘selfie’, maybe even ourselves, just as he was gazing at himself.

Until 11 February at www.npg.org.uk.