Remembering the anger, dignity
and intimacy of Nina Simone
I
t was bold to name this Proms
tribute to Nina Simone after her
famous protest song. Her easy-
going hit numbers are so ubiquitous
they’ve created a false image of the
great singer. The extraordinary
range and sophistication of Simone’s
recordings, the depth of loneliness
and longing for love they express, her
unappeasable anger at the injustices
suffered by African Americans before
the Civil Rights movement – all this
is in danger of being drowned out
by the millionth repetition of the
uncharacteristic crowd-pleaser My
Baby Just Cares for Me.
This celebration of her art was
masterminded by Jules Buckley,
chief conductor of the Metropole
Orkest, who offered a judicious
mix of the familiar with the little-
known, the intimate with the sassy
and strutting, the protesting with
the heartbroken. He called on the
services of 10 arrangers, including
himself, to come up with orchestral
versions of Simone’s enormously
subtle, Bach-inflected arrangements.
The temptation to go further andmake something over-elaborate must
have been strong, but they all resisted
it. Buckley’s own arrangement of
Be My Husband, Simone’s song about
a difficult marriage (with words by
Simone’s own abusive husband),
had a telling simplicity, just drums
and clapping hands. Jeremy Levy’s
arrangement of I Put a Spell on
Yo u cleverly paid homage to the
sumptuous strings of Simone’s 1964
recording, but with its own subtly
original spin.All this provided an ideal backdrop
for the two star singers, Ledisi and
Lisa Fischer. They were interestingly
contrasted; Fischer was the more
agile, soft-toned of the two, given to
elaborate, soaring roulades of a soul-
meets-baroque kind – exactly right for
“Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido
and Aeneas, slipped in as a reminder
of Simone’s classical aspirations. Even
more spellbinding was her rendition of
the African-flavoured Dambala, where
she duetted ecstatically with one of the
orchestra’s trumpeters.
Ledisi is more the classic belting
soul queen, so it fell to her to deliver
the immortal Mississippi Goddam,
which she did with an authentic
Simone-like tone of defiance and
rage, uplifted into joy. She sang
Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas with a
heartbreaking intensity that topped
even Simone’s version, but just as
moving was the moment when she
joined Fischer and two members of the
trio LaSharVu for Simone’s hymn to
African-American womanhood, Four
Women. It was a beautiful reminder
that quiet pride and dignity were also a
potent factor in Simone’s art.This review ran in some earlier editions.Prom 45Mississippi Goddam
Royal Albert Hall, London SW7★★★★★
By Ivan HewettBold: Jules Buckley conducts the Metropole
Orkest, with singers Ledisi and Lisa FischerMARK ALLANSee this Prom on Aug 30 on BBC4, and
then for 30 days on BBC iPlayer, and
listen for 30 days on BBC Sounds. The
Proms continue until Sept 14. Tickets:
020 7070 4441; bbc.co.uk/promsPortrait of the artist
as a mummy’s boy
Former RSC director Adrian Noble tells Alex Preston about his debut
film, which explores LS Lowry’s intense relationship with his mother
she looked next door, indeed – and she
saw aspiration, achievement, wealth,
that she could not touch.”
It’s striking that it was the working
classes that his mother spent her life
denigrating that Lowry elevated in his
art. “You find things beautiful nobody
else does,” Redgrave’s Elizabeth tells
him at one point in the film. Lowry’s
best-known work is of throngs of
matchstick-like figures against half-
imagined industrial landscapes, smoke
curling up from factory chimneys.
Coming from the Mill is one of his most
iconic paintings, featured repeatedly
in the film.
He’s not just a painter of grimy
working life, though – The Lowry’s
collection is full of seascapes and
portraits, even some beautiful bucolic
pieces. I ask Noble what he thinks it
is about Lowry’s art that speaks to
people so powerfully.
“If you look at any of his pictures,
there may be between 30 and 100
people in it, but they are all always
isolated. He draws collections of lonely
individuals, he doesn’t draw crowds.
And there’s always one figure looking
at the artist, at the camera, if you like.
You have all these scenarios playing
out across the canvas and it builds up
into an orchestra of working-class life.
A totally original artistic eye.”Noble was not trying to make a
film that was historically accurate,
but rather a work of fiction based on
real lives, telling deeper truths. “It’s
not biographical and in a way that’s
irrelevant. What Martyn and I were
trying to explore was the triangle that
formed between Lowry, his mother
and the art. It seems to me that there’s
an umbilical cord between the attrition
and rigour that happened inside that
bedroom and the art that he produced.”
Noble recognises that the death of
Lowry’s mother was both an agonisingloss and a liberation for the artist.
“It left a hole inside that was never
filled,” he says. “And it explains why
he was never interested in awards or
knighthoods. But clearly his work was
coming to a boil round about that time,
and death very often creates a freedom
for people.”
This freedom didn’t extend to
finding a love to replace the suffocating
love of his mother, however. He died
saying he had “never had a woman”,Arts
W
hen LS Lowry
was offered a
knighthood in
1968, he turned it
down, the last in a
(record-breaking)
five refusals. On this occasion, he told
a reporter that there was no point in
honours if his mother wasn’t there to
see him receive them. Lowry’s mother
died in 1939, the same year he began
to experience the first stirrings of
critical and commercial success.
Lowry’s work has become such a
central feature of British art history, his
expressionist vision of the industrial
landscape of the North so ubiquitous,
that it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t
until he was in his early fifties that he
achieved any kind of recognition. In
his late forties, he was still living with
his mother in a Pendlebury terrace,
cooking her meals every night when
he came home from his rounds as a
rent collector, going up to the attic to
paint only once she had fallen asleep.
Mrs Lowry & Son, the first film
by Adrian Noble, the former Royal
Shakespeare Company artistic
director, explores the life of this
enigmatic, likeable artist and his
relationship with his overbearing
Victorian mother. The film is an
adaptation of a play by Martyn
Hesford, and retains the intimacy and
claustrophobia of a stage production
in its presentation of the corrosive
atmosphere inside the bedroom of
the invalid Elizabeth Lowry. Thefilm limits both the physical world it
inhabits and its cast of characters. It’s
basically a two-hander, with Timothy
Spall playing Lowry and Vanessa
Redgrave putting in an explosive
performance as the embittered,
snobbish, hypercritical Elizabeth.
It makes for an extraordinary piece
of cinema, whose power to move
and shock is increased rather than
lessened by its restrained palette.
Mrs Lowry & Son came about by dint
of a happy coincidence. Since retiring
from the RSC, Noble had worked a
great deal in music, and had a few
film projects that failed to take flight.GETTY IMAGES“I spent many happy months in LA
working up a romantic comedy for
Meg Ryan,” he tells me over the phone.
“They didn’t think it was very funny,
but we did.” Then, in 2013, Noble’s wife
went to see a play about Lowry at the
Trafalgar Studios in Charing Cross.
“She said it was absolutely fantastic,”
he says. “The screenplay came to
me and I wondered if it would work
as a film and I thought it did, very
much so. The core of the play – this
claustrophobic, abusive relationship- takes place in one room. You don’t
want to open up Rear Window, do
you?”
Elizabeth Lowry was brought up in
a strict Victorian family and claimed
that she felt distant from her son (born
in 1887) from the outset, having hoped
for a girl – she apparently couldn’t
look at “Laurie” as a baby. She’d
married a Northern Irishman, Robert
Lowry, a clerk with good prospects
who failed to fulfil his promise and
ran up a host of debts. The family left
their Victoria Park home in 1922 and
came to Pendlebury, a move that was
always seen by Elizabeth as a defeat.
Robert died in 1932, leaving his widow
and son to pay off what he owed
(something Laurie achieved only when
his paintings began to sell).
Elizabeth’s rancour was, Noble
says, very clearly driven by her social
position. “She was on the cusp of the
working class and the lower-middle
class, and that was a very, very painful
position to be in. She looked around –
Mrs Lowry & Son is on general release
from Fridayand while he left his estate to a
younger woman – Carol Ann Lowry
(no relation) – their relationship was by
all accounts chaste
Partly, one suspects, for budgetary
reasons, but also because it makes
for a better film, there’s no attempt to
stage grand Lowry landscapes here,
no crowds thronging around the mill.
Instead, there are scenes which might
have been excerpted from the corners
of one of Lowry paintings, regular
nods that demonstrate that this is a
film that’s in dialogue with the artist’s
work without trying to replicate it.
“That would have been a highway to
nowhere,” Noble tells me. “Occasionally
I encountered elements that I
recognised from the paintings. I came
upon the steps that he painted two or
three scenes upon and thought this was
a bit of a gift from heaven. So I changed
the script so I could feature them. In
fact, the opening shot of Lowry is of
him on those steps.”
There’s still a degree of snobbery
about Lowry among art cognoscenti,
the sense that he’s a tad too popular, not
quite classy enough to be embraced.
“All that melts away when you go to
Manchester, to The Lowry,” Noble told
me. “You see the way they cherish him
there, the way they embrace his work.
It’s simply wonderful.”
The film ends with a fantastical
flourish, with Spall as Lowry, dressed
in a mac, walking into the gallery that
bears his name, sitting down in front
of his art and eating his sandwiches.
I speak to Claire Stewart, the curator
of the Lowry Collection, who says
that she felt it was particularly fitting
that the film should finish up in the
Salford gallery. “One of the things he
was worried about towards the end
of his life was, ‘Will I live?’ Would he
last, would his reputation endure? I
think it’s a vindication of his life and
work that The Lowry exists. It’s a
testament to his reputation.”‘She was on the cusp of the
working class and the
lower-middle class, and
that was very, very painful’Family ties: LS lowry, above, in 1958.
Left, Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy
Spall in the film Mrs Lowry & Son© THE ESTATE OF LS LOWRY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2019
Mother dearest: Elizabeth Lowry,
painted by her son in 1925The Daily Telegraph Monday 26 August 2019 ** 25
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