Nigel Kennedy: ‘According to Labour, if you don’t believe in a million genders you are Right-wing’
Should you be walking down a certain street in Swiss Cottage and hear the exquisite strain of a violin drifting over a wall, the chances are it will be Nigel Kennedy practising in his back garden. It might seem hard to imagine the agent provocateur of classical music prancing among the undergrowth with his fiddle like some fey woodland sprite but add a couple of days worth of stubble and an Aston Villa shirt and it suddenly becomes plausible. You won’t catch him playing Mozart, though. “I can’t stand him. It’s coffee table music for the bourgeoisie. Like the people who live around here, for instance.”
What he almost certainly will be playing is Bach. We’ve met ahead of Bach Now!, a series of concerts that sees Kennedy reunited with the Oxford Philharmonic to perform Bach’s solo violin concertos. Kennedy has an almost religious affinity for Bach and plays his music every morning first thing for two hours. “I do it before I look at my phone, before I do anything,” he says. “It sets me up for the day, helps me remember I’m a musician and not some business monkey. Because I’m so much on tour, I wake up with Bach more often than I do my wife.”
In 2011, following an acclaimed performance of Bach at the BBC proms, he accused his fellow musicians of turning Bach’s music into “shallow showpieces” and suggested the obsession with period authenticity was pushing him “into a ghetto”.
Does he still stand by that accusation? “I don’t go to classical music concerts much, to be honest, I find them boring, so I don’t know who is playing Bach these days. But it’s lessening his music to reduce it into a mathematical formula. It denies the spiritual reality.” Of course, many people still associate Kennedy with Vivaldi. Does it bother him that he hasn’t made a Bach recording that’s had anything like the impact of his 1989 album The Four Seasons, which became the bestselling classical recording of all time, shifting more than three million copies, and turned Kennedy into a global superstar?
“I would never diss Vivaldi!” he says. “That record opened the door to a very private members club for millions of people. Some people were sniffy about it but all my mates in the terraces at Villa really liked it. Look at all those musicians coming out of the conservatoires now. If they had anything remotely resembling a brand they’d get down on their hands and knees and thank Allah.”
By which he means he knows full well which side his bread is buttered. Now 66, Kennedy remains the antic Leveller of the concert hall, a ‘man of the people’ known as much for his bovver boots, jazz and pop fusions as he is for his sublime skill on the violin.
I’d expected him to have mellowed with age but he has lost none of his love for needling the establishment. The only problem is, he now sees the establishment as largely being the liberal Left which, as a committed socialist, pains him deeply. “I hate it that, according to the Labour party, if you don’t believe in a million different genders then you are Right-wing,” he says. “I hate the fact that the left have been hijacked by politically correct thinking in all senses of the world. So has the BBC.”
He’s not, for instance, a great believer in human-induced climate change. “Look at us, out here on a balmy afternoon, but somewhere, some killjoy will be telling us we need to feel bad about this because of global warming.” He doesn’t believe in speed limits either. “Thatcher told us we were so lucky to own our own cars. But these days you can’t drive faster than 20 miles anymore in a built up area.” The smoking ban is another example of what he considers the gradual erosion of basic human freedoms. “You used to be able to enjoy a pint and a ciggie after a hard week’s work. Not that I’ve ever smoked tobacco,” he adds with a wheezy cackle. “No, I smoke ganja so the ban doesn’t affect me.”
In 2021 he responded to a recent Proms in which the American soprano Joyce DiDonato had dedicated her performance to “transgender people all around the world” by jokingly declaring during a rehearsal with the BBC Symphony Orchestra that he would like to dedicate his performance “to all the forgotten and displaced heteros”. It didn’t go down well. “People had a sense of humour failure over that one,” he says now. All the same, does he feel the white heterosexual man is under threat? “Not particularly. I’m not Andrew Tate. But I hate sheep politics. Even if it’s reasonable I’ll probably take the opposite side because I hate lots of people parroting the same idea.”
Certainly you certainly won’t find him joining in the chorus of despair at Arts Council funding cuts. “I don’t despair whatsoever. We’ve got far too many orchestras. It’s about time those classical musicians sitting in their ivory tower stood up and [raised their own money] like [artistic director] Marios Papadopoulos has done with the Oxford Philharmonic, which is privately funded. Maybe some of the money could then go to more pertinent forms of music like young singer songwriters or big band jazz.”
Nor does London need another concert hall. “Bollocks to that. What we need is more football pitches.” One thing he can agree on is the state of Radio 3. “They do sound a bit desperate. They need to stop telling people how to feel. As a performer, we do our best to communicate something but it’s really up to the listener to decide whether Bach makes them think of church spires or trees.”
Kennedy’s pub geezer banter belies a middle-class upbringing. His grandfather Lauri Kennedy was principal cellist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Kennedy grew up in Brighton. He studied at the Juilliard School in New York, which he partly financed by busking on the streets. Before that – from the age of seven – he studied under Yehudi Menuhin, whose school he credits with cultivating his snotty-nosed distaste for authority.
“All these sycophants were there, holding on to [Menuhin’s] every word. I found that doing sh-t my own way was so much better. I’d rip off the coat they insisted you wear during a performance and start playing the violin, and people loved it!” Presumably this was partly because he was also good enough to get away with it? “I could play, yes.” Come on, surely even then you were brilliant. “I’m better at it now. I love music. It’s a really lucky thing to be involved in.”
This is the odd thing about Kennedy. He is humble about his stupendous talent and quite cocky about everything else. He flaunts his punk-rock image because he knows it’s what people want. “It’s why people come and hear me. They like me being a renegade. They knew classical music was always a stuffed shirt.”
He mourns, too, the fact there is no one else like him. “Modern conservatoires, with their reliance on syllabus-oriented training, are just production lines these days. Everyone sounds the same.” Yet at the same time, his values are almost touchingly old-fashioned. He applauds dedication above almost everything.
Kennedy lives most of the year in Poland with his second wife Agnieszka Chowaniec, who partly manages his career, and loves the central role the violin occupies in Eastern European culture. “They take music seriously there. There’s no fear about hard work.” And he believes passionately that classical music should be for everyone. “Henry Wood and the Proms got that bit right.” Really, beneath the attacks on woke and the ‘cor blimey’ bluster, Kennedy just wants to play the violin. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I can put music first forever.”
Bach Now! Runs from Nov 7 in various venues oxfordphil.com
