The violinist and the gentleman

Before I met him, I suspected that there were two distinct Nigel Kennedys. Now, though, this is beginning to look like a hopeless underestimate.

The first Nigel Kennedy — the blokeish joker — comes on stage at the Smetana Hall, in Prague, with his £2-million violin held aloft and wearing what appears to be a satin judo jacket. He walks down to the front of the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,'' he says. “It's a great honour for us to be here at the Prague Festival.'' He stops. There is a long pause. “... Ummm ...yeah,'' he adds.

Then he goes through a prolonged — and pretty excruciating — bit of business with the leader of the orchestra: The two of them touch fists, clasp hands and do a variety of high- and low-fives. But when he starts to play, something extraordinary happens.

As Sir Simon Rattle, who conducted Kennedy in the Elgar Violin Concerto, once said: “To know who Nigel is, you have to listen to his playing — and look at his eyes while he's playing.''

The moment Kennedy puts his violin under his chin, he is transformed. An expression comes over his face that manages to be both agonised and blissful.

As he plays Mozart's Violin Concerto No 4 — typically inserting a jazzy cadenza of his own halfway through to inflame the purists — I find myself trying to think who he reminds me of.

Eventually, it comes: Beneath his tufty bog-brush hair, he looks just like Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy; guileless, innocent and, in the rawness of emotion he puts into his playing, so exposed that he might almost be naked.

Yet it is not quite that simple. Periodically, the blokeish Kennedy breaks through. He lunges at the cello players, hops about and roams around the stage in his simian crouch.

Later on, he will kick a football into the auditorium, wander among the audience while still playing his violin and touch fists with a 10-year-old girl. “Cool, man,'' he says to her afterwards. This should be excruciating, too — and so it is in a way.

But it is less stomach-churning, less blatantly exhibitionistic than you might think. Instead, it has its own bizarre kind of integrity: here is someone doing exactly what he wants, unfettered by convention or self-consciousness.

Growing-up pangs

During the interval I head to his dressing-room to find out why Kennedy has become the person he is. Not surprisingly, that meant going back to his childhood.

His father, the lead cellist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, abandoned his piano teacher mother when she was pregnant and left for Australia.

As a baby, Kennedy would be put under the piano in his Moses basket while his mother was giving lessons. He grew up a painfully shy but supremely gifted child and, at the age of 7, was sent to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey.

“I did find it difficult,'' he says, “at least to begin with. Now I've blotted a lot of the memories out. In one sense it was a very tolerant sort of place; it didn't matter if you were Jewish or Chinese or whatever. But it could also be very harsh.

If someone played badly, they would be ridiculed by the other kids. So in that sense, it was real survival of the fittest.
“For a long time, I resented my mum for sending me there. But, in retrospect, life must have been very difficult for her, too.''

What Kennedy didn't know — at least until later — was that Menuhin himself was paying his school fees. “Yehudi was this real altruistic role-model as far as I was concerned.

Later on, though, things became a lot more difficult. He was disappointed that I wasn't going to become a Yehudi Menuhin clone, so we had a big falling-out. But then we were reconciled at the very end of his life.''

At some stage, Kennedy also decided that he didn't like his upbringing. People, he reckoned, were trying to turn him into something he wasn't — namely a nicely spoken, conventional middle-class boy, when, in fact, he was the son of a far from well-off single mother. And so began the first of his attempts to re-invent himself.

All the time, though, people kept trying to tell Kennedy how to conduct his career. When he was at the Juilliard School, in New York, and the great jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli asked Kennedy to play with him at Carnegie Hall, his teachers warned him that no classical record label would ever touch him if he did — Kennedy ignored them and went ahead, anyway.

Then, in 1989, came his big breakthrough. When he decided that he wanted to record Vivaldi's Four Seasons, his record company, EMI, told him he would be lucky to shift 50,000 copies.

Kennedy, however, had worked out that The Four Seasons was tailor-made for a non-specialist audience.

“It had 12 tracks, each about three minutes long. It was perfect in terms of popular culture,'' he said. The Four Seasons went on to sell two million copies, making it the biggest-selling classical album of all time.

It is time for Kennedy to go back on stage. He puts down his teacup, picks up his violin and walks out to play Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

It is an intensely romantic performance that reduces the audience to rapt, even tearful, silence — a silence broken only by a storm of applause when he finishes.

Because my flight was late and we haven't been able to talk for long, I arrange to telephone Kennedy the following evening. When I do, it is as if another Nigel Kennedy altogether answers.

This time there is no swearing, no “mans'' and he is far more fluent than before. Perhaps he is just better on the end of a phone. Or perhaps everything else is just a protective screen to disguise his shyness.

Nigel Kennedy will play Elgar's Violin Concerto and the Nigel Kennedy Quintet will perform later the same evening at the Proms, Royal Albert Hall on July 19.