명연주자 Kennedy

[일등감자]

Cover Story Excerpted from Strings Magazine, February/March 2000, No. 84 Photo by Rankin. Live Kennedy The Comeback Kid by Timothy Pfaff It’s a good thing that Kennedy’s playing speaks for itself, because it’s a difficult phenomenon to discuss sensibly. Both the playing and the player divide opinion, and not just in two. Virtually all the possible positions one could take have already been staked out and articulated. Sides have been taken. Meanwhile, the bad-boy behavior and angelic playing continue apace, and, evidence is, one preternaturally cheerful violinist is laughing all the way to the bank. There’s a mountain of detritus, most of it print, between the Kennedy phenomenon and anyone trying to get a clear view of it—due in no small part, of course, to Kennedy’s own insistence on disguise. About the only thing that’s clear is the famous Kennedy sound—a penetrating, insinuating, involving, achingly pure tone with steady, enlivening energy, strong inner direction, and not a hint of fuzz around it—ironically, in so many ways the opposite of its maker. Or is it? One possible interpretation of the evidence, the body of which includes his forthright, just-pals interview deportment, is that Kennedy is a simple kind of guy who’s never wanted to do anything other than play the music he loves—whatever that may be—and not have the purity of his artistic intentions sullied by the oils of commerce. The other, of course, is that he is one of the most cunningly self-promoting artists on today’s concert scene, a one-man musical circus. Whatever the case, it’s not every artist who could achieve increased visibility by disappearing, which is precisely what Kennedy did in the early ’90s. Easily the most attention-getting thing he’s done—in a career that often seems to be about little else—was vanish. But even today, more than two years after his much-vaunted return, Kennedy’s five-year "sabbatical" from the classical concert stage is a move about which he’s notably circumspect. "I was stepping back from all other considerations and revisiting in my mind the reasons I wanted to be a musician in the first place," he says in a recent interview in San Francisco, where he is performing the Brahms Concerto with the Symphony. "I think music should be a spiritual experience, and if it gets taken over by a kind of technical formula of interpretation, or professional formula of presentation, then you’re no longer being the artist you wanted to be in the first place. "I think it helped me in a big way," he continues. "It wasn’t like I was leaving classical music behind. I was leaving the professional attachment to it behind. I practiced Bach for an hour every morning. And I played in a local club—I tried out my [Jimi] Hendrix ideas and some other ideas with my band. Instead of going around the world all the time, playing for strangers, I got into playing for the people who were around me, for my friends." Whatever personal clarity he achieved during his time away, it wasn’t reflected in a clarification of his image. Returning with one name fewer hardly counted as coming back with less baggage. It appears there would still be some unpacking to do—starting with the name. Call him anything you want, the smart opinion now has it. I’ve saved the phone message that makes it clear he still refers to himself, at least offstage, as Nigel Kennedy. Consequently, it’s hard to see the name "change" as anything but a game he’s playing with the business and with the press. That said, at least it’s a game, and somebody, the perpetrator at least, is having fun with it. As he wrote in the liner notes to Kennedy Plays Kreisler, his second EMI CD after his comeback, "I have been accused of gross arrogance when dropping my first name by some who think only having one name is seemingly (to the petty and mean-minded) comparing myself to the other one-namers. . . ." Here he lists not Midori but Bach. Then comes the clincher: "What hasn’t been noticed is my unprecedented humility when dropping the prefix Dr.!" In what little hindsight the still-unfolding story affords, the Nigel Kennedy saga turns out to be a 1990s Prodigal Son tale. By the time he made his celebrated first recording of the Elgar Concerto, in 1984—his first for EMI and the first CD to win Gramophone magazine’s newly instituted Concerto Award—the 28-year-old virtuoso had already made his debuts with the major European orchestras, including the all-important Berlin Philharmonic, played all the major festivals at home in England and on the Continent, and been the subject of a five-year documentary by BBC-TV on the making of a soloist. The Gramophone Award carried his reputation across the Pond and, with this conquering of prize-conscious America, Kennedy became, unequivocally, international in his superstardom. He became the darling of the hugely influential British music press and, with or without his consent, was made the fair-haired boy of British fiddledom. In fact the hair tells the story without prevarication. Tracking the album-cover photos provides a chronicle of the progress of the rake. The cover of his first CD, all Elgar, for Chandos, boasts an English-schoolboy type who could have stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory film. By his first CD for EMI, of the Elgar Concerto, Kennedy sports a fetchingly disheveled Beatle mop mussed in a studied way, the kind of sensitive hair that likes to have wind in it. A mere two CDs later, on one devoted to the Tchaikovsky Concerto, he displays a Peter Sellars–like brush of hair pointing north (but still carefully coiffed) that marks the turning of a corner from which there has been no return. Then, too, the penultimate paragraph of his bio in the CD booklet for the prizewinning Elgar Concerto—the one before the mention of the "Cathedral" Stradivari he played "at the express wish of its former owner, the late Mrs. Dorothy Jeffreys of Trebetherick, Cornwall"—reads, in an ain’t-it-sweet gush: "Nigel Kennedy’s interests go beyond classical music into Indian music and jazz; he has given concerts with Stéphane Grapelli and played at the Chichester and Cord Festivals with American jazz musicians. He is also an ardent cricket fan and supporter of Aston Villa." The British hadn’t had a fiddle prince since Sir Yehudi Menuhin, the very man who first gave Kennedy a leg up in the business by taking the gifted youngster into his school at age seven. So for a while, everyone was happy. Although Kennedy later rued the fact that in those heady days his accent sometimes drifted farther up the social scale than its natural pitch, he followed a more or less predictable career path for most of the rest of the 1980s, lightly spicing the main-course concertos with sides of Ellington and grittier Bartók. But by decade’s end, when Strings first interviewed him ("Monster Music," Spring 1989), a notably more rebellious Kennedy was punking up, talking down, playing "real music" in late-night venues after concerts, and calling "The Cathedral" by a new nickname of his own invention, "The Monster." He was baiting the press and the industry that made him, and everyone knew it. An increasingly divided press stepped up the complaints, one side about the coarsening of the act (performing the Berg Concerto dressed as Dracula at the BBC Symphony’s 60th-anniversary concert, for example), the other, this writer included, about an audible decline in the playing both on stage and on recording. Kennedy’s slow, deliberate walking away from what he called "dead guy" music was as sure a bet as the music establishment had to offer—and might have caused a lot less grief if, on his way out the door, Kennedy hadn’t slammed it with a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, playing and conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, that went double platinum and ultimately made the Guinness Book of Records as one of the best-selling records of all time. Predictably, even understandably, the industry wanted more of that action, but an increasingly fed-up Kennedy wanted less. The recordings that followed, Brahms, Beethoven, and Sibelius, drew mixed notices and performed unremarkably, as, mostly, did Kennedy. By 1992 hardly anyone truly thought that some time out was a bad idea. Early in the leave there were rock-star wannabe shenanigans—the trashing of his room in Berlin’s Grand Hotel Esplanade in 1992 made news—but more significantly there was some necessary chilling out, a decamping to the English countryside with his girlfriend Eve, who already had a child and bore Kennedy another. The increased opportunity to play other kinds of music was not, however, matched by comparable opportunities to record it. EMI issued Kafka, a recording of Kennedy’s own compositions that, Kennedy says now, "They weren’t busy making people aware of. I don’t think they were pleased to get something that wasn’t Vivaldi’s ‘Eight Seasons,’ so it wasn’t hugely marketed. You might be able to get one for a dollar somewhere." For all that, when Kennedy returned to the concert stage, in 1997, little but the violin—now a del Gesù of his own that his fame and fortune had brought him—had changed. He still arrived on stage dressed as if from a free box (albeit a free box in one of the posher, trendier London neighborhoods) with his hair looking like a gardening accident. The stage deportment was, if anything, more extreme, with the violinist indulging in footwork like a noisy, arthritic moonwalk, some outlandish facial grimaces, and even more exaggeratedly palsied interactions with his fellow musicians on stage. The playing, however, had its old technical wizardry—and a new authority. The Prodigal Son part of the story—which is, after all, actually about the father, not the son—is that the press accorded him an open-armed welcome back. Gramophone, as one prominent example, put him on the cover, and the reviewer of his return release—a new recording of the Elgar Concerto—cooed, "No one lucky enough to attend the EMI Centenary Concert at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall last July [1997] when these same artists performed the Elgar is ever likely to forget the experience. Kennedy and [Simon] Rattle formed an inspirational alliance, their interpretation positively brimming over with re-creative flair, intensity, and danger." At last, the signal word: danger. Probably the most misleading perception to get tossed into the Kennedy mix was that the increasingly rebellious violinist wasn’t just descending into philistinism but was becoming dangerous—that he was capable of doing things that would not just embarrass people but actually might hurt them somehow. That’s unthinkable for anyone who’s ever talked to Kennedy and encountered, in person, the little boy in the grown-up’s suit (the very one whose punk duds have the short pants legs). And it certainly doesn’t jibe with his repertoire, which is not only not shocking but almost reactionary. His second EMI release as the one-name Kennedy is, of all things, Kreisler, the wonders of which are many. Kennedy plays with a sweetness and finesse, and manifest adoration of both the repertoire and his historical precursor, that rivals Joshua Bell’s (in what may still be Bell’s finest recording). Plus Kennedy pushes beyond the expected bon-bons to include the composer’s A-Minor String Quartet, performed with some of his regular colleagues. And, most interesting of all, he finds an acoustic for the recording that’s so eerily like that of vintage 78s, Kreisler’s own format, it’s almost chilling in its perfection. One of his latest releases, Classic Kennedy, is the "my favorite things" potpourri that most violinists begin their recording careers with. "I’ve never done the collection of shorter works I love," he says, "whether they were pieces originally written for the violin or whether I had to arrange them myself. But it was something I had wanted to do for quite a while." In fact, the 20 items on the disc range from violin classics such as Massenet’s "Meditation from Thaïs" and Bach’s "Air on a G String" to Gershwin piano preludes, a Chopin nocturne, and Handel’s "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" to Joni Mitchell ("Urge for Going") and even Kennedy ("Melody in the Wind"). Then there’s a "Danny Boy," ascending in both range and sentimentality with each verse until it hovers, tremulously, in the musical stratosphere, that’s played like it’s his mother’s dying wish to hear it. "I love ‘Danny Boy,’ man," he says, "particularly when we’re close [as of this writing] to having a peace deal for Ireland. It’s one of those songs that carries the hope of peace, I think." EMI seems to have whiffed Vivaldi’s "20 Seasons." "I managed to get the recording company to invest in a fair amount of recording time," Kennedy says. "Because of all the union rules, it’s sometimes hard to do what we did in the studio, which was to have the whole orchestra there all the time. What it meant was that when we finished one piece, we could go on to whatever felt like the right piece to do next, because the right players were there. So if we felt like going to a slow work, we could, because we weren’t just stuck with the players for a fast work. It actually took the players a while to get used to it, but once they understood what was going on, there was a really fantastic atmosphere in the studio." It’s the playing that’s calculated to get the attention in Classic Kennedy, and it’s sure to. But the violinist is just as interested in the arrangements, as manifestations of the direction that’s the most compelling one for him at the moment: "my compositional work." That can be heard at its fullest in his other new recording, The Kennedy Experience, on Sony Classical. Named in salute to the 1970s rock phenomenon The Jimi Hendrix Experience, it features six compositions that are "inspired by" the songs of the legendary rock guitarist but in fact are far more than arrangements of them. "People could listen to it trying to catch their favorite Hendrix songs and not hear them for quite a bit," he warns. "It’s really original work—my music—inspired by melodic fragments and harmonic progressions by Jimi." Anyone expecting undisciplined, over-amped wildness from the disc will be as disappointed as those seeking literal Hendrix transcriptions (the only burning instruments are in the art on the accompanying booklet). The music is acoustic, for starters, and it’s sophisticated and challenging in the sense that it continues to yield more on repeated hearings. And the fiddle playing is pretty dazzling. The eight musicians (Kennedy included) who perform the music make up what he simply calls "my band. It’s not a jazz band, so to speak, even though it’s been called that. It would be lovely to do some straight-ahead jazz playing again, and that is on my agenda, but that’s not what this is. There’s a jazz guitarist in the band, who comes from an English folk-rock background, and a rock guitarist, a couple of classical players, and a couple of others from more modern performance arenas. "All I do with my band members is tell them not to play the way they normally do. By that I mean that the jazz guitarist is not allowed to play jazz, the rock guitarist is not allowed to play rock, and like that. This way I can relate to these people as people, as opposed to players who are just putting out the doctrine of what they’ve been taught in the past. The music for some of the players is notated, and the rest is improvised—about half and half. My part is totally improvised. I act as the stimulus for the other musicians, and I get things moving off me that I can react to as well. "The last thing I wanted to be," he continues, "was another bloke trying to be an electric guitar player like Jimi Hendrix. There are enough people out there trying that. Now I’d like to do the same kind of thing in albums of Celtic-inspired music and Hungarian-inspired music. I don’t mean that kind of elevator Celtic music a lot of people are doing right now, and I think it might take me five years or so to come up with something in that vein that isn’t totally banal. The same with the Hungarian music. I’m stunned by the amazing, passionate music Hungarian fiddlers play—but before I wrote my own music in that vein, I’d also want to study the singers as well. Just imitating the fiddlers would be pointless." Kennedy adds that his plans call for a substantive amount of collaboration with other musicians as varied as pianist Chick Corea, conductor Lalo Shifrin, and cellist Lynn Harrell. He’s already performed to considerable acclaim with Harrell, with whom he’s also recorded a CD of duos slated for imminent release. "He’s amazing, that bloke," Kennedy says of Harrell. "I haven’t heard a cellist play with that much warmth since Jackie DuPré, and I think he’s at a new creative high with his playing. When we worked together, we hardly had to talk. The musical process was what it should be, emanating from music, logic, and generosity. "When I was away from classical music—from the professional performance of classical music, let’s say—he wrote me a letter saying, ‘I love your playing, and if you ever come back, let me know because I want to be at that concert.’ I thought that was a lovely thing for someone I didn’t know all that well to do. It shows generosity and humility. When I proposed that we work together, he was up for it." None of this displaces, only augments, his ongoing interest in what he calls "Romantic" concert music for the violin—by which he means the central classical violin repertoire, though not restricted to the 19th century. "I’m talking about music that builds things in structures of phrases leading to other phrases in movements over a longer time scale," he explains rather opaquely. "You can play Bach that way." That repertoire does offer him limited compositional outlets, by way of devising his own cadenzas, but his approach to cadenzas has undergone significant changes over the years. "I’ve been playing the Beethoven Concerto a lot lately," he reports, "and even though I subscribe to the Fritz Kreisler cadenza in the first movement, in the last movement, where there’s usually a short cadenza, it’s turning into an increasingly extended one of my own making. It even has a little orchestra accompaniment as well. It’s probably my most interesting venture into composing cadenzas. "I did compose my own for the Brahms, which appeared on the recording of the concerto I made with Klaus Tennstedt [EMI 54187]. But, as a performer, one has to be perfectly honest with oneself. I put myself in the position of the listener and asked myself which one I would want to hear. I had to admit that the Kreisler, which has always been my favorite, beats the shit out of mine. I don’t think that for the sake of looking like a clever boy, I should overlook a magnificent and inspired cadenza that has interesting ways of treating the themes and loads of heart." It’s the one he did play, rapturously, in the San Francisco concert, an otherwise mixed affair that found the violinist advancing a deep, compelling sound but rather little in the way of a distinctive interpretation. There were, in fact, mitigating factors, not the least of them an eleventh-hour replacement of the announced conductor, the dynamic young Finn Sakari Oramo, with Andreas Delfs, the young German conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony. For whatever this says about the current state of one of the most hard-to-pin-down players on today’s string scene (and an individual who manifestly likes things that way), the concert’s unalloyed triumph was an encore, dedicated to the memory of Milt Jackson, the jazz vibraphone legend who had died the week before—and whom Kennedy called "one of the great composers of the 20th century." With San Francisco Symphony principal bass Michael Burr, Kennedy held the Davies Hall audience rapt with his lofty, transcendent performance of Jackson’s "Bags’ Groove." Kennedy, it’s clear, is back in one.