A Maverick, of the Violin and Generally

Allan Kozinn

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1998 | 11:33 a.m.

NEW YORK -- Probably the first thing to know about the English violinist Nigel Kennedy is that having returned to the classical concert stage after a five-year self-imposed exile, during which he worked almost exclusively on rock projects, he is no longer using his first name.

In the tradition of Madonna, Prince (in his pre-glyph days) and the British pianist Solomon, he is now listed on concert programs and recordings simply as Kennedy. At the end of his program note for a recent Elgar recording, he added: "P.S. I've changed my name because I never liked the name Nigel. Cheers!"

The second thing to know, though, is that he doesn't really mind being called Nigel.

"I suppose it was partially a contemptuous thing to do, to rile the British critics," Kennedy said during a recent stopover in New York, just before starting a tour that includes a run of performances with the New York Philharmonic and a recital at Avery Fisher Hall this weekend. He performs at 8 p.m. today at the Artemus Ham Concert Hall at UNLV.

Wearing a torn and faded Disney T-shirt, a frayed leather jacket, nondescript work pants and two-tone hair (brown and blonde), Kennedy, who is 41, sat on the lawn in Central Park and reflected on the fallout from this minor provocation.

"I was amused that certain people were calling me arrogant for calling myself only one name," he said, "but they never questioned their own arrogance in telling me how I should call myself. But I don't care what people call me."

A product of both the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Juilliard School, he built his career by producing a sound that can be either ear-catchingly bracing or uncommonly beautiful and by giving performances that are sometimes illuminating and sometimes wayward but which consistently bear the imprint of a willful, original interpreter.

No one could accuse him of being risk averse. When he recorded Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" in 1987, he added some extremely idiosyncratic touches, among them a wildly modernist violin overlay in the slow movement of the "Autumn" Concerto, and cadenzas linking several movements. Critical brickbats notwithstanding, the recording sold more than a million copies.

Since then, Kennedy has made a game of thumbing his nose at the classical music world. He gave up wearing concert dress, preferring punk fashion and a variety of trendy haircuts.

In England, he has been known to wave the colors of his favorite soccer team, Aston Villa, during performances.

But baiting critics is only one of his joys. He also likes to keep everyone around him guessing what he'll do next.

Because Kennedy is eminently marketable and sells lots of records, no one is about to tell him to behave differently. And there would be no point in trying; his five-year hiatus, from 1992 to 1997, was his response to efforts by his managers and record label to persuade him to play the classical music game more conventionally.

As a 14-year-old student at the Menuhin School, he spent his weekends playing jazz with Stephane Grappelli, and soon after he went to Juilliard at 16, he was sitting with Stan Getz. The day he made his first recital album, in 1984, he also recorded a collection of standards.

On one of his albums, works by Bartok and Ellington sit side by side. And since the late 80s, he has played on recordings by Kate Bush, Paul McCartney, Talk Talk and the Stranglers and has made two jazz-fusion albums of his own material, "Let Loose" and "Kafka."

"When I said I was leaving classical music," he said, "it was an exaggeration, a way to get people around me to understand that I was going to have another side to my musical life and that it was going to be a big part of it. And I had to believe that myself. At the time I was on the verge of making 'Kafka.' If that album hadn't seemed satisfactory to me, I would have carried on and made another one, and then another after that until I had made something I could stand on. So it was a kind of indefinite period that I was going to be away from classical music, or at least the public performance of it. Because I carried on playing Bach and other things."

The first recording, with Vernon Handley conducting, established Kennedy as a young violinist to watch when it was released in 1984. The second, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and released last year, was his return to classical recording, and it has a breadth and fluidity that the earlier account lacked.

"I wasn't consciously trying to do anything differently," he said. "But I think music is a voyage of self-discovery and also discovery of other people -- namely, the composers. You don't want to play the same way many times. Even within a couple of weeks, it doesn't have to be the same, and after 12 years you hope you have new enlightenment. My first recording -- I think it was a decent album but a little too close to the textbook in nature. Now I think I'm more attracted to the emotional moments in the music."

A recent program's centerpiece was Kennedy's tribute to Jimi Hendrix, a chamber work he is calling "Concerto in Suite Form." The work is based on five Jimi Hendrix songs -- "1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," "Third Stone From the Sun," "Drifting," "Little Wing" and "Purple Haze" -- and "Hey Joe," the Billy Roberts song that Hendrix recorded as his first single.

"I relate to Jimi Hendrix's material very strongly," Kennedy explained, "because he had such big ears for so many different types of music. ... What I've done is deconstructed his compositions and put them together in a totally different type of way. I've written out the parts for the other players, and I'm out there on a free mission, so to speak, in the same way that Jimi had lots of well-sorted-out rhythms going on that enabled him to be free. But that's probably where the similarity ends.

Kennedy has tackled Hendrix before. In 1993, he contributed a high-energy reading of "Fire" to "Stone Free" (Reprise), a tribute album that also includes performances by the Cure, Eric Clapton, the Spin Doctors, Living Colour and the Pretenders.

Now he is about to record the "Concerto in Suite Form," and he said the recording was likely to differ from the version he is playing live. In concert, he will use only his 1735 Guarneri; in the studio, he will also use an electric violin and is talking about adding elements influenced by current English bands he likes, most notably Portishead, Massive Attack and Radiohead.

"Klassic Kennedy" -- he plans to change the name -- is to be an album of short classical works that he has arranged for violin and orchestra.

Just as his nonconformist antics have made him a lightning rod in the classical press, his incursions into pop have drawn attacks from that side of the business.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Kennedy is that beneath his distaste for the music business and beyond his provocative responses to it, he is really an old-fashioned Romantic. That comes through the broad coloristic palette and luminous phrasing of his second Elgar Concerto recording.

And it is clearer still on his latest disk, a collection of works by Fritz Kreisler in which he confounds the listener's expectations by playing such chestnuts as "Liebeslied" and "Tamborin Chinois" with warmth and suppleness while stripping away the interpretive treacle that has accrued to them over the decades. And whenever the conversation turns to the music that moves him, he drops his guard entirely.

"This 'Klassic Kennedy' album, for want of a better title," he said, "is the kind of music I've never really done on record before. It's not virtuoso fodder, which I really don't relate to, but more melodic stuff, which I really love. Things like Satie and Chopin, maybe 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and some Sarasate, where Gypsy music meets the violin. That's what fills my heart well enough to represent it with true passion. I'm looking for things that have something more than the pyrotechnique quick route to impressing people."

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