Interview: Nigel Kennedy, violinist

Breaking free of his old label’s expectations, violinist Nigel Kennedy has let rip with radical reinterpretations of Vivaldi, but is the world ready for a prog-rock vocal version of The Four Seasons... or one with drums?

WHAT is it about violinist Nigel Kennedy that so upsets the classical music establishment? It’s hard to say exactly, but his latest CD, The Four Elements, certainly won’t win him any more friends in that area.

It’s his first album since signing up with Sony Classical, after ditching EMI who, he says, “have spent the last 15 years preoccupied with looking over their shoulder and asking who was going to buy [my records]. Creative repertoire was the least of their worries, and some of my best ideas went down the plughole.”

Conceived as “a contemporary version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons”, The Four Elements is a full-on fusion of improvised jazz, progressive rock and exotic female vocals, featuring his hand-picked Polish jazz pals and the beautiful young things of his fancifully titled Orchestra of Life, with Kennedy himself generating clouds of rosin dust over his electric violin.

Listening to it, I’m struck by a freedom-to-roam policy that allows Kennedy to retrace every genre avenue he has explored over the last two decades: the classic rock riffs of the Overture; the nostalgic modal classicism of Air, embraced warmly by the sultry orientalism of female voices and a mystical, improvised violin solo.

Earth combines gravelly R&B with a momentary excursion into the sinewy jazz world of Kennedy’s one-time mentor Stéphane Grappelli; Fire and Water offer opposing strains of pop, the vocals once again casting a winsome glow. There’s much more of Kennedy the violinist in the Finale, which moves from spacious reflection to an electrically-charged, motorised climax.

Then there’s a cheeky little encore track, subtitled “It’s Plucking Elemental”. It’s a typical “Nige” sign-off – a guttural two-fingered salute sung by him with all the tunefulness of Chas and Dave, and introduced by a burp.

In other words, his Sony debut album has all the elements that have brought howls of derision from the classical cognoscenti who, all those years ago, expected a less subversive attitude and more conformity to concert hall stereotype from the former Yehudi Menuhin child prodigy as he emerged from the hothouse teaching environment of New York’s Julliard School in the late 1970s.

In case you’re wondering what all this has to do with a column normally reserved for news and views on classical music, bear in mind that Kennedy will be performing The Four Elements live alongside Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as part of his forthcoming 2012 UK tour, which comes to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in January.

But even then, all is not as traditional lovers of Vivaldi might expect. Enter Damon Reece – a drummer more notable for his work with experimental pop groups Massive Attack and Goldfrapp – with a drum track intended to ignite electronic storms among the existing milder weather patterns of Vivaldi’s original.

“It’s a new version of the Vivaldi,” says Kennedy, who first made his mark on this particular work with a feisty – some would say brutish – recording released 22 years ago this week that may have seemed heretical to the sober, academically-driven early music boffins of the day, but which went on to sell two million copies worldwide and became the top selling classical music recording of all time.

“With Vivaldi I always think I f***ing own this music, but when I realised I was going to be touring it again, I had to do something new with it. I couldn’t do the same shit as when I done the last album,” he says, his trademark “mockney” and token profanities geared to throw you off the scent and disguise a sincerity that, even over the phone, is perversely endearing.

But how does he justify a version that, in addition to Reece’s drum track and Kennedy’s own flamboyant improvisations, will contain vocals with lyrics and other deviations from the printed score? Surely there comes a point where Vivaldi gets chucked out of play and something else takes his place.

“Playing this music should not be a dead act,” he argues. “I see Baroque music the same way I see the evolution of jazz over the past 100 years, which is strong harmonically, but which in the heat of performance calls on everything from impressionism to serialism.”

In other words, expect a brand of improvised ensemble playing that uses the essential bedrock of Vivaldi’s catchy sequences and suspensions, but allows the mood of the moment to inspire feverish excursions into a world where no stylistic holds are barred.

“The 25 musicians I’m bringing up to Edinburgh are all top geezers,” says Kennedy. “Quite a lot of them won’t have played together before. Some will just read from charts on the page which gives them a feeling for the harmonic scheme. I love the added vocals, especially as Vivaldi’s music emanated from poetry anyway.”

The Vivaldi itself will be recorded as a follow-up to The Four Elements, forming the second of three CDs in Kennedy’s initial three-album contract with Sony. “After that we’ll be doing a Duke Ellington album. We’ve tried the Ellington stuff around Germany a lot and it’s gone down well,” he says.

Kennedy turns 55 this December, and a recent long-awaited sell-out return to the BBC Proms – a late-night solo gig playing Bach – says everything about a newfound popularity in Britain of the cad with the Strad.

Does he feel more accepted in the UK now? “Any cynicism that was around when I changed course all those years ago was really only in Britain,” he suggests. “Germany and Poland were more open to the style of music I’m interested in. It was only here that I was treated as a petty criminal.”

Although Kennedy spends a lot of time in Poland these days – his second wife is Polish – he still finds time to fit performances of the classics into his concert schedule in the UK. But he’s choosy about what he takes on.

“I used to find concerto work very transient and unsatisfying. I would arrive at one orchestra, work with them for a week, then move on to the next, with no real opportunity to develop a decent relationship. Where there’s a chance of touring with an orchestra, then I’m more likely to consider it.”

That’s exactly what he’ll be doing next year in a tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that comes to Perth Festival in May. “I’ll be playing the Brahms concerto,” he says. Presumably without rhythm section and vocals.

• The Four Elements is released this week on Sony Classical. Nigel Kennedy’s UK Tour begins in January with a performance at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on 12 January 2012.