Nigel Kennedy Four Seasons

Nigel Kennedy - Plays Jazz (1984)
Label: Chandos | MP3 320 KB/s | Covers | Total Time: 54:55 | 139 MB
Genre: Jazz Instrumental Violin

In this day and age of unspontaneous music making, even in the fields of pop and jazz music, Peter Pettinger and I for this disc, at least, were totally unrehearsed. And I hope that the spontaneity which arose because of this has more than made up for the lack of rehearsal. I, certainly, can imagine having spent far more time and worry on a worse disc … but let me tell you how the disc came to be in the first place:
To be honest, I suppose I should say I am more well known as a classical musician, and it was in this guise that Peter Pettinger and I went happily to the pub having just finished recording the Elgar sonata and pieces four hours ahead of schedule. After a drink we both felt like playing again and Brian Couzens (our producer) was game enough to come and record us. My years playing with Stephane Grappelli and in clubs in New York have left me with an insatiable appetite for playing jazz (and, incidentally, any other kind of music) and since Peter Pettinger is such a tremendous jazz pianist we decided to play a few standards. Here is what we came up with, completely unrehearsed and unedited. Stephane Grappelli often used to call me his musical grandson, so 1 hope he likes this disc but will allow his "grandson" to misbehave once in a while…Nigel Kennedy

Feelings run high about Nigel Kennedy, the bad boy of the violin (he's started using his first name again, if you hadn't heard). On the cover of this collection, he's pictured with red and blue paint on his unshaven face, biting the side of his violin for one reason or another. But Nigel Kennedy's Greatest Hits points to what has really always been the ironic thing about Kennedy – when it comes to the music, he's quite un-outrageous.

Medieval Baebes and other far greater shocks to the bourgeoisie have come along. Wild adventures placed under the rubric of performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons are commonplace. Yet Nigel Kennedy continues to roost atop the classical sales charts in Europe, and even to command a decent following in the U.S. despite a low American tolerance for British eccentricity. How does he do it? He has kept reinventing himself successfully. Perhaps he's the classical world's version of Madonna: he's possessed of both unerring commercial instincts and with enough of a sense of style to be able to dress them up as forms of rebellion. Inner Thoughts is a collection of slow movements – inner movements of famous concertos from Bach and Vivaldi to Brahms, Bruch, and Elgar.

Nigel Kennedy created a sensation with his pumped-up Vivaldi on The Four Seasons, and this second volume of concertos with the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic offers more of the same: slapdash tempi, outrageously loud dynamics, over-the-top techniques, a pugnacious basso continuo, hammered exchanges between soloist and orchestra, and an aggressive pop/rock sensibility that speaks more of this star violinist than of the composer.

Nigel Kennedy Quintet,with guest star Jeff Beck
MP3 @192 kbps | Covers | 45.3 MB
BBC Proms 2008 [no label, 1CD]
Live at the Royal Albert Hall, July 19, 2008.

Nigel Kennedy might be known for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons but the violinist has his rock side and is no stranger to either Jimi Hendrix or The Doors. Earlier in the evening, Kennedy had performed Elgar’s Violin Concerto but for the later part of the show, for a moment there, one would have thought it was Pat Metheny and his Synclavier, for that was how Kennedy came across. Unlike the earlier classical portion, here Kennedy weaved between jazz, folk and rock. The highlight and surprise for the audience was when Kennedy brought Jeff Beck on stage. Allaboutjazz.com reported: “Nigel was particularly keen for me to do the Hills of Saturn solo,” said Beck, who played the track on his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. John Fordham wrote in The Guardian: “As an improviser, Kennedy has an originality of spontaneous line and rhythmic attack that most classical players lack in this context, and several of the pieces worked up a fierce, guitar-mimicking, Hendrix-like momentum… A romantic ballad dedicated to 1960s folkie Donovan was sublime, and so was the darkly elegiac Hills of Saturn - the latter richly harmonised with Tomasz Grzegorski’s tenor sax and Adam Kowalewski’s bass. Surprise guest Jeff Beck conjured an astonishing panpipe-like sound from his guitar.”

Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto in D Op.77
Nigel Kennedy / The London Philharmonic / Klaus Tennstedt
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 206 MB | Full Artwork: 63 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: EMI # CDC 7 54187 2 | Country/Year: UK 1991
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

…Technically Kennedy's playing as represented on this disc is beyond reproach—anyone who can play the finales flying thirds and sixths with such dash and precision plainly knows how to get what he wants out of the instrument. The performance is, as you would expect, highly idiosyncratic, though fortunately there's nothing to match the controversial stylistic excursions of his Four Seasons… Kennedy seems inclined to treat the [first] movement as a kind of colossal accompanied cadenza…

In Ms Minogue's garish book of weird and wonderful portraits of herself, Kylie, there is one which stands out: it is a simple and beautiful picture of a violin. It turns out that Kennedy has called his violin "Kylie", and so it was deemed worthy of a place in the book. This in-yer-face silliness could go either way, and translate into a trashy populist crossover approach to music–or be the mark of someone who genuinely wants to break down musical barriers and make waves.

It’s hard to imagine performances of Bach’s violin concertos like those of Nigel Kennedy or, now, these by Daniel Hope, passing muster two generations ago. But since then, Bach’s model, Vivaldi, has enjoyed a second rebirth through the midwifery of period instrumentalists who have sped up the tempos of his fast movements and shone light through the ingeniously transparent textures of his slow ones, all the while employing a wider range of colors than hitherto imagined.