It’s 22 years since I first met Nigel Kennedy, but some things never change.
Instead of a handshake we have the mandatory clash of knuckles. “Ooh, very
hip,” I say. “And more hygienic, man,” he replies.
Equally obligatory is ten minutes of heavy-duty football talk. Even at 51,
Kennedy takes his footie as seriously as any other overgrown adolescent.
This is the man who once had his Jag painted in the claret and blue of his
beloved Aston Villa. When I arrive at his North London home (his second
home, now that he’s settled in Poland with Agnieszka, his young Polish wife)
his PA is copying all of next season’s Villa fixtures into his diary. After
that, presumably, she’ll have to repeat the task for Cracovia, his adopted
Polish team. “Most important thing you’ll do all day, darlin’,” he says.
The formalities over, we settle down to serious talk about music. Which, with
Kennedy, is easy to do. People who write him off as a showman, clown or
poseur on the basis of his (admittedly distinctive) sartorial taste, quips,
mockney accent and fondness for pricking Establishment pomposities with a
barb, are grossly underestimating his talent, intellect and capacity for
sheer graft.
His rebellion against his starchy upbringing – a prodigy at the Yehudi Menuhin
School, then three years in the hothouse atmosphere of the Juilliard School
in New York – may have been long, noisy and sometimes hazy. But in all that
time he never stopped practising the fiddle for hours every day.
As his mesmerising performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto at his “come-back”
Festival Hall concert in March reminded everyone, he’s still a world-class
performer in mainstream classical repertoire. But grafted on to that core
genius – or perhaps a different demonstration of it – has been his
increasingly sophisticated excursions into jazz. It’s this breadth to his
musicality that lifts him into a class of his own. If he were a sportsman he
would have won Wimbledon twice, dabbled with international gymnastics and
then turned himself into an Olympic-class swimmer.
The Proms audience will be getting a unique demonstration of that breadth.
Because of Kennedy’s famous clash with a former Proms director – the late
Sir John Drummond, who fatuously described him as the “Liberace of the
violin” – and then his own self-imposed exile from British concert halls, he
hasn’t appeared at the world’s biggest music festival for 21 years.
To make up for lost time he has a double engagement at the Albert Hall next
Saturday. First he will play the Elgar in a conventional orchestral concert;
then (as if that exhausting 50-minute journey were not enough) return with
his jazz quintet for a 90-minute late-night set, including much of his own
folk-rocky music. “I compose up in the hills, man,” he says. “I’ve found a
little cabin in the mountains in Poland. It’s perfect. I play on the piano
to get the structure, then track a violin over the top, then put it in front
of the band to see how it goes.”
The band are Poles who have been knocking around with Kennedy for five years.
I ask how he selected them. As with most things in his life, what seems on
the surface to be random turns out to be carefully considered. “I met them
all separately at jam sessions in the jazz club near where I live in
Cracow,” he says. “I thought: that’s the drummer I want, that’s the bass
player, and so on. They’ve all got their own projects.”
Can he speak Polish? “Enough to get a beer and some pity from both genders.”
So what attracted him to the Polish jazz scene? Indeed, what attracted him to
Poland? “Same thing, really. The attitude of the musicians is what the
people are like in the country as well. They are hard-working, but also know
how to party. They’ve got intelligence, discipline and heart. It isn’t often
you get all three together. And they aren’t clock-watchers. I found that
with my orchestra [the Polish Chamber Orchestra, of which he’s artistic
director] as well as with the band.”
Which, as Kennedy has famously made clear in the past, is not what he thinks
about the British orchestral scene. He has been scathing about how little
rehearsal he is granted with British orchestras.
“I can see where the problem comes from in Britain, and it’s understandable,”
he says. “Musicians have to look at the clock here because they have to get
to the next sesssion to pay their mortgage. But it does make life difficult
when you don’t see the same faces in concert as in the rehearsal.”
Although Kennedy directs the Polish Chamber Orchestra from the violin, he
doesn’t conduct it. The pointlessness, greed and general uselessness of
conductors is another of his much-aired themes. “Actually, I envy
conductors,” he says with a grin. “They don’t have to learn the music if
they don’t want to – not really learn it, as you do when you play a
concerto. If they put their arm in the wrong direction during a performance
the orchestra probably won’t be put off. Whereas if you put your arm in the
wrong direction when you are playing the violin, quite a lot of people will
be put off.”
Conductorless or not, the EMI recordings that Kennedy has made with the Poles
have created as much of a stir – though not quite so much outrage in
sensitive circles – as his best-selling disc of Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons, replete with sub-Hendrix sound effects. Coupled with his
brilliant new recording of Beethoven’s Concerto, for instance, is a
performance of Mozart’s Concerto No 4 that includes cadenzas incorporating
jazz and world music. Composed by Kennedy, they are played on an electric
violin with double-bass backing. That got the purists steaming.
“I can’t see that Mozart would have minded,” he grins. “He wasn’t exactly
averse to the technical developments of his own day. He embraced the piano
when he could have carried on playing the harpsichord. He would probably
have loved to bomb out the ears of some aristocrat with something electric.”
Does this mean that Kennedy’s long-standing antipathy to Mozart is now
officially at an end? “I had a bad experience a long time ago, when I
improvised a cadenza in a Mozart concerto, got in a terrible mess, ending up
sounding like Debussy, and then – when the orchestra came in – found I was
in the wrong key. I left Mozart alone for 20 years after that. But that was
also the time when the horrible authenticity movement was around, and I
didn’t relate to that.”
In its way Kennedy’s recording of two rarely played Polish violin concertos,
by Emil Mlynarski and Mieczyslaw Karlowicz (don’t pretend you’ve heard of
them), is equally revealing. It’s not that the music is particularly
startling, though both concertos are ripe, late-Romantic pieces full of
fervour, tunes and scintillating figuration. It’s more what they say about
Kennedy’s unquenchable musical curiosity. Six years ago, after he played the
Elgar concerto in Warsaw, an audience member handed him an old recording of
the Mlynarski. Many star fiddlers would have feigned delight and promptly
tossed the disc away. Kennedy played it, loved it, resolved to champion the
work afresh, and has kept his pledge.
Has he got any more unknown Polish concertos in the pipeline? “I’m on the
lookout, man! I love playing Romantic music, something with a bit of meat in
the harmonies and some expansive architecture in its structure. Something to
get your teeth into. Know what I mean?”
Kennedy is at the BBC Proms (0845 4015040) on July 19 2008. A Very
Nice Album by the Nigel Kennedy Quintet is out on EMI. The quintet tours in
the autumn
So glad Nigel's back at the Proms. Loved his concerto although the jazz was not to my liking I admire him for his courage to buck the system and the 'purists'--they don't know what they're missing.
Margaret, Beadnell Northumberland,
There is only Three words to describe Nigel Kennedy
MAGNIFICANT ! sheer Brilliance
Jones, Lichfield, England
Bob - can you play the Elgar concerto?? He's an artist, they're not the same as you & I.
Simon Stock, Meppershall, Bedfordshire
Well Californian Bob, I'm looking forward to your next next recording of the Beethoven. When is it due?
Ed Zuiderwijk, Cambridge, UK
Also Bob the word is puerile from the latin puer meaning boy.
Why castigate a violinist for the way he speaks?
Ken Fillmore, Sawbridgeworth,
Sorry Bob - but how snobbish an attitude to take.
He's not some high-class orator, he's a very talented musician who is also very clever in his methods of appealing to us lower-classes and kicking sand in the faces of the perfectionists.
So he says "Man" all the time... we all have quirks!
Mike Hartley, Peterborough, England
Bob Brown, clearly you do not know the man or his music. I am sure you will think Bob Dylan is shallow, purile and pathetic as well, he still says COOL MAN, WAY OUT, GIG and JAM SESSION et al.
Lloyd, London,
Does he still say '...........man' in every sentence?
How shallow, how purile! How pathetic!
Bob Brown, Carlsbad, USA, California