If you look into these faces, the strained, frowning, tense smiling ones, you will not be able to avoid the impression: The musicians of the Basel Chamber Orchestra are not only highly suspicious of what is happening here, worse, they are embarrassed. The chamber orchestra is a serious, serious ensemble with expertise in the most varied of epochs, but it doesn’t help them much here. And not that someone comes here and says: “Sure. Somebody just has to dare to combine serious and entertainment music and they’ll be stomped into the ground.” Because the fact that Nigel Kennedy has been trying for eons (and still succeeding with his fans) to show people an E for a U is not the problem.
The only problem is how he does it. It doesn’t matter that he comes on stage in his brightly colored Kennedy habit. It doesn’t matter that he stomps across the stage like a child elephant in a cage that is too narrow. It doesn’t matter that he sometimes gets uncomfortably close to his colleagues. Or, rather, none of that would matter if there was a good reason for his fooling around. But the only conceivable explanation is that Kennedy is a tired artist, unable to comprehend musical processes and with a technique that frays on all sides that makes it impossible to create tension and expression without resorting to stage tricks.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, a notoriously delicate work, reveals these weaknesses. Kennedy fiddles through the first movement in dull legato and fragile characters; the devilishly difficult larghetto singing in the highest register is hardly recognizable; the rondo is surprisingly tame, up to a cadenza in which Kennedy (at the piano!) pays homage to Little Richard. Well, maybe this most weighty of all violin concertos is a little too big for him. Now he is playing his own opus “Für Ludwig van”, which premiered in July 2021. How does that sound As if an inspired senior had learned what “enharmonic mix-up” means and then let off steam on the music notation program. A couple of Beethoven quotes, no musical cliché left out, the same motifs excessively repeated without motivation, many arpeggios and tremolos for the soloist, i.e. everything that looks difficult but is not so difficult to perform. And if you look back on these three hours with a red head and hot ears, you will be shocked to discover: The most beautiful moments were when Kennedy sat at the piano, pressed a few chords and let the orchestra play the music.