the times | Saturday December 18 2021 saturday review 19bias against British talent. However, with
his punkish outfits and laddish banter, he
ruffled the feathers of music’s pompous
overlords and nowhere more so than at
the BBC.
When Kennedy tried to evoke the
death-fixated spirit of Alban Berg’s Violin
Concerto by donning a black cloak and
“some ghostly make-up” to play it, he was
publicly lambasted by John Drummond,
the all-powerful controller of Radio 3, for
“dressing like Dracula”. That happened
30 years ago and Drummond has been
dead for 15 years, yet Kennedy still feels
so bitter that he describes Drummond
(an inspired director of the Edinburgh
Festival as well as the Proms) as “the mostfutile over-educated toff I have ever had to
deal with”.
Later Kennedy caused friction at the
BBC’s Last Night of the Proms where he
appeared alongside two formidably woke
American women: the conductor Marin
Alsop and the singer Joyce DiDonato
(neither of whom Kennedy names). Irri-
tated that DiDonato had declared that she
would be dedicating her performance
“to transgender people around the world”
(“WOT D FUKK?? WHY?” Kennedy
asks, not unreasonably), the violinist
announced at his rehearsal with the BBC
Symphony Orchestra that he was dedicat-With his punkish
outfits he ruffled the
feathers of music’s
pompous overlords
ing his performance “to all the forgotten
and displaced heteros”.
“As I finished my sentence,” he writes,
“my eyes rested on the front of the viola
section. I saw two very unamused women
glowering at me as if heterosexuals
shouldn’t be allowed to be recognised or
celebrate anything. The conductor also
seemed rather unsupportive.” I bet she did.
“The Bleeb Bleeb C [sic] won’t make shows
with me any more,” he observes. “Jimmy
Savile was OK, but apparently I’m not.”
So revelatory in some ways, Kennedy
leaves a few glaring gaps in his tale. We are
told that his son, Sark, now 25, is “doing
quite a lot of renovation of houses”. In fact
he has just been sentenced to 33 months in
prison for drug dealing. Although Ken-
nedy tells us that his stepfather regularly
beat up his mother, he never thinks to
analyse the effects of his own ceaselessly
peripatetic, bohemian lifestyle on his off-
spring. Instead he devotes 34 pages of hag-
iography to Aston Villa Football Club,
writes fawning pen portraits of celebrity
chums such as Gary Lineker, and relates a
“conversation” with Beethoven in which
the dead composer tells him that “you are
the only one not programmed by the same
outside influences I fought against as a
composer, conductor and pianist”.
I had to put on Kennedy’s sublime
recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto to
remind myself why I had wasted six hours
reading this stuff, but that only raised
another question. How can a musical
genius capable of touching the soul in so
many different styles be such a prat in
daily life? I expect they asked the same
question about Mozart.highly strung Nigel Kennedy’s book starts as biography, then explodes in a dozen different directionslooted from Constantinople in an act of
appalling treachery, before being looted in
their turn by Napoleon, but they came
back and the real ones are now in the cath-
edral’s museum. Much cathedral building
was financed by the shameless selling of
indulgences. Rouen’s “Tour de Beurre” was
financed from indulgences bought by citi-
zens who wished to eat butter during Lent.
“Surely the most light-hearted of fund-
raising gimmicks,” Jenkins writes.
The delays described in this book make
the building of HS2 seem lightning-quick.“Lorrain’s political instability delayed the
rebuilding [of Metz Cathedral] for two
centuries.” In Tours, the local expression
for “when the cows come home” is still
“when the cathedral is finished”. In Ulm,
construction stopped between 1543 and- That’s some hiatus. St Vitus’s in
Prague was halted by the Hussite wars at
the turn of the 15th century and by Bohe-
mia’s devastation in the 17th. Better that,
though, than building big too fast, as hap-
pened with Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Two
armies of builders, each 5,000-strong, set
to work in 537 to complete the north and
south elevations in record time. The result
was “botched joints”.
What is most wonderful is that so many
cathedrals are still standing, despite wars
and anti-religious regimes. Marvelling at
the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral in
Moscow, Jenkins tells us that a conserva-
tionist, Pyotr Barankovsky, was sent to
the gulag in 1933, as a punishment for
demanding the cathedral’s protection.
What a hero. Stalin wanted the cathedral
demolished, but never quite had the
nerve to proceed. Thank goodness. Regu-
lar services resumed in 1997. Cathedrals,
as this illuminating book shows, can cope
with hiatuses.
JOHN KELLERMAN/ALAMYPlays like an angel, acts like a prat
Y
ou may think the memoirs of a
famous violinist would make a
nice Christmas present for a
maiden aunt or perhaps a 12-
year-old who has just passed
grade 5 on the fiddle. A glance at the book’s
opening pages might make you think
again. It’s a glossary in which Nigel Ken-
nedy gives us his unique definitions of
musical terms. For instance: “Kunt-duck-
tor — guy or whatever who waves a white
stick at or against an orchestra.”
These days, I guess, it’s the “or whatever”
in that statement that may give the most
offence, but then, as Kennedy writes:
“Being 64 years old, the way I often
express myself could be considered to be
politically incorrect by today’s thought
police, particularly when I think I’m being
humorous.”
His book starts as biography, then ex-
plodes like a firework in a dozen directions
at once before fizzling into random digres-
sions so dull that Kennedy feels obliged to
admit that “this is on the verge of becom-
ing too boring to credibly expect someone
to carry on reading”.
True, but the trajectory uncannily
reflects his life. He was a dazzling child
prodigy, mentored in very different ways
by Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grap-
pelli, but wildness was ingrained on his
psyche from the start. His later career (that
is before he disappeared to a village on the
Polish-Slovakian border) was marked as
much by ostentatious boozing, general
hellraising and slanging matches with the
classical music establishment as by his
undeniably gripping and astonishingly
eclectic performances in the classical, jazz
and rock fields.
That anti-authority streak was evident
in his student days. He was deeply un-
happy at the hothouse Yehudi Menuhin
School in Surrey (with tutors who had
“absolutely no idea how to teach kids” and
pupils who were “highly talented, direc-
tionless, unhappy little bastards”), and
hated his years in New York at the famed
Juilliard School (“of musical mediocrity”,
he adds).
Also apparent in Kennedy’s teenage
years was an irrepressible impetuosity —
or reckless irresponsibility, depending
on your viewpoint. Given the honour of
playing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto
with Menuhin himself in Norwich Cathe-
dral, the 13-year-old Kennedy got drunk
in a pub and missed the gig. Finding he
hadn’t enough money to settle the bar bill,
he directed the landlord to send it to
Menuhin’s home address. With saintly
tolerance, Menuhin forked out the cash,
then wrote Kennedy a gentle note advising
him that “although the occasional drink
probably doesn’t do one much harm,
smoking can be really detrimental for
one’s health”.
Such a wilful personality was never
going to slot easily into the staid classical
music business of the 1980s and 1990s.
When Kennedy made his boldly reimag-
ined recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,
his phenomenal sales could not be ignored
— even by a British record company (EMI)
that, as Kennedy tells it, had a perverseTRINITY MIRROR/MIRRORPIX/ALAMYThe demon fiddler is a
bore as he revels in his
rudeness and spite,
says Richard Morrison
He longs for us to
recolour cathedrals
as they were in the
Middle Ages
man with toothache on Wells Cathedral
Nigel Kennedy
Uncensored!
by Nigel KennedyFonthill, 328pp; £25