Arpedon Krater Nigel Spivey

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.

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)…

This recording was made the same day as Kennedy's debut recording (Elgar Sonata.) He had some studio time left over, so he and Peter Pettinger spontaneously played some jazz standards. No planning, no rehearsal, no previous experience playing jazz together. In that context, this is a remarkable recording. And a historical first that will likely never be repeated - debut classical and debut jazz recording being recorded on the same day.
Jazz violin is hard to come by. Few people have the technique to play the violin well enough to even begin to serve the free flow and spontaneity of jazz. And few, if any, jazz musicians have ever recorded a more than passable performance of classical repertoire…

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.

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.

Their fourth Christmas release, BBC Music Magazine Award winning choir Tenebrae return under the expert direction Nigel Short with a sumptuous album of Carols, Hymns and other celebratory works for Christmas.

The solo boy soprano album has a kind of intensity, born of knowing that the sound will soon end, that attracts some and puts others off, but Norwegian treble Aksel Rykkvin, with flawless schoolboy good looks, has become something of a sensation with this album of Baroque and Classical arias. His voice has a rather metallic quality, and you might think that forcing it into these big arias would be an unnatural thing. Yet in fact some of these pieces, including the tough arias from Handel's Alcina, were originally written for a boy soprano, and Bach's church music made use of them as well. Rykkvin handles the acrobatics quite well.

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.