Also, Concertos for two violins, strings, and continuo. Nigel Kennedy,
Berlin Philharmonic. EMI 7243 5 57666-0-1.
Quoting from a
booklet note, “No living musician has done more to revitalize Antonio Vivaldi’s
status than Nigel Kennedy--who has brought unimaginable sales of his work to
every corner of the world.” Certainly, Mr. Kennedy sold a lot of CD’s of his
earlier Four Seasons, but to hear the
PR department talk, you’d think nobody else had ever recorded the piece. It is
this kind of hyperbole that permeates the entire album.
Where before he had
the English Chamber Orchestra to accompany him, Kennedy this time had members
of the Berlin Philharmonic behind him, and apparently starting with this Four Seasons from 2004 they intended to
record as much Vivaldi as the public could stand. However, I guess it was such
a daunting enterprise, the public soon found itself exhausted with Vivaldi
overload, and to my knowledge Kennedy and the Berlin players produced only one
other Vivaldi album, called Vivaldi II.
In any case, Kennedy
is a magnificent violinist with a bravura talent, which, unfortunately,
sometimes gets in the way of the music. Listeners to these Four Seasons interpretations will find them either delightfully
fanciful and innovative or annoyingly self-conscious. I’m afraid I’m in the
latter group. Kennedy invests each
movement with so many subjective trills and frills and stops and changes of
tempo that one feels the head spinning. Some of it, frankly, is just plain
bizarre.
I rather expect
Kennedy approaches his music here in the same way he approaches his status as a
classical superstar, with the idea that image is everything. He appears to
glory in his own reflection of the common, if nonconformist, man, complete with
the once-curious haircut, facial stubble, working-class clothing, and London
East-End dialect; and it is this brazen, nonconformist attitude that he brings
to The Four Seasons. The thing is, the music, so quaint and expressive in
its own right, doesn’t need further doctoring up. Well, maybe it did wonders
for Kennedy’s disc sales, I don’t know.
More impressive to
my mind are the fillers, Vivaldi’s Concertos
for Two Violins in A minor and in D.
Perhaps because people know them less well, whatever Kennedy does with them is
less noticeable. They are quite vivacious in his hands, splendidly alive,
although again somewhat quirky in matters of tempo and tone. As an extra
incentive, at the time I first reviewed this recording, EMI offered the music
in a two-disc set, the second disc being a seventeen-minute promo on DVD. Here
the narrator again tells us how much Kennedy has done to revitalize the Vivaldi
movement worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy himself expounds upon Vivaldi’s music and
plays excerpts from the CD.
EMI’s sound does not
strike me as among their best, it being a bit on the bright, hard, almost edgy
side, with little compensating bass response to balance out the affair. There
is not much depth to the sonic image, either, and, indeed, it’s hard to tell
exactly how many Berlin Philharmonic players are attending the soloist. The
result is not so much realistic or natural as it is theatrical.
To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:
JJP
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