Kennedy is blazing his own trail (From The Argus)

Kennedy is blazing his own trail

8:20am Monday 23rd January 2012 in Interview By Dominic Smith

Nigel Kennedy has always made speaking his mind a virtue. At his first ever performance he ordered the London Philharmonic Orchestra around as if he were conductor.

“I remember being a bit nervous because I was thinking, ‘I am a third of the age or less than most of these old codgers in the orchestra, and are they going to do it the way I want?’”

Even then, at 14 years old, Kennedy was more concerned with the piece than protocol.

“I was trying to get them to sound good,” he explains, as he is whisked through central London by a driver whose destination is ClassicFMstudios.

Next, a schoolboy snigger and cackle comes down the line.

“But I was only a little bit less obnoxious than I am nowadays.”

Indeed, some 40 years on, though interviews are no longer done with a bottle of bubbly in one hand, he is as forthright as ever.

In 2008, he dismissed star conductors as egocentrics more interested in money and prestige than developing a musical relationship with an orchestra.

Last August, fresh from a Proms performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works for solo violin, he accused the classical music establishment of failing to do justice to the German’s legacy.

On being arrested in 2010 for smoking cannabis at a post-concert party at a five-star hotel in Bavaria, Germany, he says, “As far as I’m concerned, lighting up a spliff is not going to do anyone else any harm.

“I have never had a bad time with the German police before… I think they were just making a big issue because they wanted to get some kind of name, you know, and get in the papers with it.”

Attitude is one reason the punkish man with the mini Mohawk loves Brighton.

“I love the eccentricity and idiosyncrasy of Brighton.

People can be themselves.

It’s not such a conformist city. It’s a city of individuals who have character.”

Kennedy was born here.

That debut performance with the London Philharmonic was beneath the Brighton Dome Concert Hall lights. So happy are those early memories of Sussex, a country retreat in the South Downs has been added to his property portfolio that includes homes in Krakow (his second wife of ten years, Agnieska, is Polish) and London.

Not that Kennedy, a teenage prodigy, really spent much time in Brighton as a youngster.

After revealing a talent for picking out Fats Waller tunes on the piano aged only ten, he was packed off to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey and its founder even paid Kennedy’s tuition fees.

Next stop was Juilliard School in New York, before another mentor, the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, asked him to play at Carnegie Hall – only three years on from his debut performance as a bossy teenager in Brighton.

Those two maestro violinists from different genres allowed him “to see the variety and the breadth of what the violin was capable of doing”.

His first recording was Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1984. Five years later Kennedy’s take on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the English Chamber Orchestra sold more than two million copies.

The only thing to trouble young Kennedy was more prosaic.

“My mum is from Brighton, so I had all the parents there at that Brighton show and that’s always the worst. If you’ve got your parents at a concert it puts a bigger pressure on you than anything else.”

Kennedy’s parents met in Brighton. John Kennedy, once principal cellist of Sir Thomas Beecham’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, fell for English pianist, Scylla Stoner, when they were studying at London’s Royal Academy Of Music.

John eventually left Stoner to return to Australia, unaware she was carrying their son.

Nigel had turned 11 when father and son finally met.

“They were teenagers and Brighton is where their romance blossomed. When they reached retirement age, my mum and my stepdad, who was also from Brighton, came back down from the Midlands.

I have a lot of good memories and background in Brighton.”

Kennedy’s love for football is well-known. It is matched by his passion for all things Polish. At Przystanek Woodstock 2010, his orchestra wore the Aston Villa colours and directed the crowd through the team’s chants. His first football experience was on the South Coast, however.

“You know I’m a Villa fan really but, like, the first football I ever went to was, like, at the Goldstone Ground. So that was a catastrophe when that b******, for want of a better word, went off and sold it to Safeways or whoever.”

The street-talk, swear words and stage games are too much for some. Kennedy’s black cloak and white make-up performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto at the 1991 Proms (“it was about his young niece who died of leukaemia; it was meant to be the spirit leaving the body”) disgusted then director Sir John Drummond.

He compared the violinist to Liberace.

As he arrives at Classic FM, I hear him greet the security guard at the lobby desk in a manner the staff won’t have heard since he last visited.

“Aaarggghhh, good to see you, Killa, everything cool?”

Then he’s back with me again.

“Sorry! He’s a top man. My geezer down here, I know his face every time, man. It’s nice when you get to see the same people.”

The football banter and pally tone have opened up his elite world to a new audience.

As did the collaboration with Kate Bush, his Jimi Hendrix covers, cameos with The Who and Robert Plant.

It seems an adventurous mind is more important than affectation.

“Playing Beethoven or Jimi you can learn a bit about yourself.

Beethoven wasn’t trying to copy Mozart. Jimmy wasn’t trying to copy Howling Wolf. They were both completely original spirits.”

Unsurprisingly, he prefers working with rock musicians than classical musicians.

“They are a lot more open-minded about what the final result can be.

It can be much more of an unexplored journey when you are working with a contemporary-type musician than a classical-type musician, because a lot of them have a preconceived notion of how it should all end up.”

That notion of ending up somewhere more interesting appears to be a life mantra.

“I think many fiddlers are semi-gypsy, semi-busker types of people. You have an instrument that is easily portable and this moving around has become part of my psyche now. Sometimes I try a couple of months without doing any gigs, but that energy is irreplaceable.

It gives me the energy for life.”

The other main energy source for Kennedy’s style is improvisation, a technique linked to his passion: jazz.

Fret-wandering jazz was marginalised African Americans expressing themselves in the face of European styles. There is surely something similar to Kennedy’s maverick approach to the classical establishment?

“Well, I always knew I could make enough money to be vaguely happy just playing on the street.

Because, in New York, when I was living there, you could earn enough money working on the street, so I never felt any pressure to be like any other musicians.

“I just thought I’ll do it on my terms and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, no big deal. I think that has probably given me more enjoyment because if you are trying to emulate what someone else has done, you’re never going to do it as well as they have.”

Due back in his home town to play another rewrite of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (this time with programmed beats from Massive Attack and extra singers) and a new work penned in Sussex, Four Elements, with 12 classically-trained musicians, he signs off as only he could.

“To be yourself is a much more natural thing to do, you know. Proper, man.”

* Nigel Kennedy plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Nigel Kennedy’s Four Elements with The Orchestra Of Life at Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, on Monday, January 23.

For tickets call 01273 709709. This is the rescheduled date from September 15, 2011. All original tickets still valid.