Nigel Kennedy And Kroke East Meets East (2003) {emi Records}

After restoring his first name, Nigel Kennedy (aka, the artist formerly known as Kennedy), released a series of recordings on EMI as virtuosic and eccentric as himself: East Meets East, Inner Thoughts, The Vivaldi Album, and the Blue Note Sessions. But despite the enormous musical diversity of those records, little could have prepared one for the album that followed: Polish Spirit, featuring violin concertos by Emil Mlynarski and Mieczyslaw Karlowicz and arrangements of Chopin's 2 Nocturnes, Op. 9.

First, as a violinist I can guarantee that Nigel Kennedy IS NOT a mediocre violinist, he is surely a great violinist one of the best of our time. Mr. Hurwitz you must be the kind of people Kennedy criticizes because you just can't accept the fact that he can play any kind of music being Jazz or Classical music or any other good music in a high level and he does play it very well as well as you can't accept his image and his way of thinking, and we can see it on your critic where you spent the whole message criticizing Kennedy and made just a small and not very happy commentary about the album.

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.

Kennedy has shrewdly augmented the regular concerto coupling of Bruch and Mendelssohn with the rare Schubert work, and the result is a generous issue which on every front can be warmly recommended for exceptionally strong and positive performances, vividly recorded. The Rondo in A, D438, dating from 1816, the year of his Concertstuck in D for violin and orchestra, was originally written for solo violin accompanied by string quartet.

Nigel Kennedy’s repackaged 1986 recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is an adventure – free, rhapsodic, emphasising the constant flow of song which is the work’s main asset. Perhaps he’s a little over-keen to emphasise what melancholy there is here, nearly bringing the outer movements to a halt with the bitter-sweet dreams of second subjects, but the Canzonetta is a miracle of introspection. All this passes Gil Shaham by. While the young Israeli clearly has a fabulous palette, conjuring a bright, beautiful sheen at the top of the instrument (though unduly spotlit by DG), he rarely uses it discriminatingly enough, and the sense of flexible movement so vital for the Tchaikovsky is missing.

Like his teacher Yehudi Menuhin before him, the artist formerly known as "Nige" proves to be an uncommonly dab performer on the viola. He certainly has the full measure of the 26-year-old Walton's astonishingly mature concerto (unquestionably the finest of the composer's three), penetrating to its bitter-sweet core with devastating emotional candour. Similarly, Kennedy's bitingly intense reading of the yearningly lyrical Violin Concerto earns the warmest plaudits in its characterful involvement and edge-of-seat spontaneity.

Kennedy, the violinist formerly known as Nigel Kennedy, has a well-earned reputation as the bad boy of classical music. His defiantly anti-Establishment antics anger traditionalists and tickle the rebellious. This venture into the Bach canon will confirm both camps in their views. Traditionalists will fume at such excesses as the exaggerated, ugly flourish at the end of the E Major Concerto and the supersonic speeds adopted for the Allegro movement of the two-violin Concerto among much else, including the puzzle-booklet more appropriate to a pop release. Kennedy's fans, though, will relish those elements of what is an ultimately fairly straightforward set of Bach interpretations enlivened by personal touches, a string sound that owes much to "authentic instrument" practices, and zippy speeds that make for exciting listening.

The album covers of the iconoclastic British violinist Nigel Kennedy often promise more craziness than they actually deliver, and that's true in the case of this release, presenting to the buyer a cartoon of a mohawk-wearing figure saying "Shhh!" The contents differ considerably from what the cover would suggest; Shhh! is a more or less straight-ahead album of jazz in various styles. Kennedy came by his inclination toward jazz honestly, playing jazz on the piano as a child and appearing in a duet concert at age 16 with Stéphane Grappelli despite warnings from his teachers. Here he appears, as on several other albums from the 2005-2010 period, with an all-Polish group of musicians (except for Afro-British percussionist Xantoné Blacq)…

In many performances of the Bartok Solo Sonata its legendary difficulty is more apparent than its beauty and nobility: the violinist sweats profusely in a cloud of resin dust, his bow reduced to a tangle of snapped horse-hair, and the sound he produces is gritty and rebarbative, eloquently expressive of strenuous effort. Nigel Kennedy's account is the most warmly lyrical that I have heard, his tone beautiful and expressive in even the most hair-raising passages.