Not Just Fiddlin’ Around : British violinist Nigel Kennedy has carefully fashioned an outrageous persona--by classical standards--to become a phenomenon

The minute he takes the stage of the concert hall, it is clear Nigel Kennedy is no average violin virtuoso.

His wardrobe is the first giveaway. On any given night he may be wearing a black silk caftan lined with crimson, two-tone cowboy boots, a baggy suit adorned with zips or safety pins--or any combination thereof. His hair is worn in a rockabilly flattop, kept erect with lavish amounts of mousse. Some nights he wears white face makeup, like a Kabuki actor.

In keeping with his garb, Kennedy talks in a glottal cockney drawl. He refers to his concerts as “gigs,” as in: “I’d like to announce that we’ve got to your favorite part of the gig--which is, like, your race to the bar.”

He may play Elgar’s Violin Concerto, then announce for an encore: “I’d like to play something by a composer who was working at the same time as Elgar,” before launching into W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”

All this represents an unconventional stance for a classical artist. It has also been a hugely successful strategy. At 34, Kennedy is a phenomenon in Britain. His recordings sell in vast numbers, his concerts sell out within hours and he has become a household name and a universally recognized TV personality.

Kennedy’s 1989 recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” has sold about 900,000 copies in Britain in 18 months. In a country in which sales of 10,000 are considered a success for a classical album or CD, this is unprecedented. So big was “The Four Seasons”--which Kennedy refers to in shorthand as “Viv”--that it entered the contemporary album charts and peaked at No. 3, rivaling albums by such pop superstars as Phil Collins and Sinead O’Connor.

In August, Kennedy packed the Crystal Palace arena in London, where 20,000 fans saw his “gig”--one of the largest classical audiences ever in Britain. Kennedy has been the subject of TV’s “This Is Your Life.” He played the Royal Variety Performance. The British Variety Club named him Show Business Personality of the Year. He is a kind of national mascot.

His success has even sparked a boom in Britain for all classical music, which increased its market share for all recordings last year to 11% from 8%.

Yet Kennedy, despite his astonishing rise, has his detractors. Some critics have leveled the charge that his success is a triumph of marketing skills rather than his musical virtuosity. In class-ridden Britain, some observers have attacked what they see as his vulgarization of classical music in an attempt to woo the kind of people who would normally never buy classical records or attend concerts.

“It’s always struck me as quite a lot of hypocrisy,” says Kennedy in a phone interview from New York. “What I’m trying to do is play seriously and reach a serious amount of people. Actually, it’s only a minority of the critics (who think it’s gimmickry). I think that music has evolved a lot in this century and most of the developments haven’t left the critics behind. There’s only a few of them that have this 1920s kind of Victorian attitude about (classical music), but it still strikes me as very strange that (trying) to reach a serious number of people could be considered unserious by anybody.

“To say that music is too good to be listened to by a serious number of people is a kind of paradox to me. As far as I am concerned, if I’m playing music, it’s too good not to be listened to by a serious number of people. That’s my attitude. I know there are a lot of classical musicians who kind of think, ‘Well, Beethoven is too good for the masses. It’s only for the Salzburg crowd.’ I think that even in Germany and places like that, where you’d expect them to have more snobbish attitudes, it is much less so because they’re willing to look at something from all sides and they actually methodically investigate what is in front of them. In fact, it is only in England where the popularity of my stuff has been pretty stupidly big, that I’ve got really any criticism at all for it.”

Now Kennedy is attempting to win over American audiences and critics. His current 10-city stateside tour started last fall with the San Francisco Symphony and has included dates with the orchestras in Baltimore and Detroit and with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

The reviews have been fairly glowing. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Robert Commanday said Kennedy’s performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was “intense and focused . . . accurate and clean as could be wanted.” Of Kennedy’s appearance and energetic performing style, Commanday added: “If that’s what he needs to do and be to get these musical results, a listener needn’t complain.”

More recently, the Detroit Free Press’ John Guinn said Kennedy is “easily the most refreshing, disarming, personal, intuitive, impetuous and unorthodox (violinist) currently before the public.”

“I seem to feel very good with audiences and it seems to be my moment of freedom,” says Kennedy. “You know, because you’re working away, trying to get everything right like a pre-programmed moron when you’re at home watching ‘The Price Is Right’ and getting your scales in tune and it’s really boring. And the moment when you forget about all the self-criticism is when you’re in front of the audience and you’re actually there to do something more fruitful than (practicing).”

Some disdain has been voiced about the fact that two years ago Kennedy hired himself a manager. (Most performers are simply handled by agents.) The man assigned to run his career, John Stanley, had a distinctly wide-ranging curriculum vitae that included stints as a cameraman, a photographer and a TV film producer. His previous forays into personal management were with pop artists--the singer-songwriter Russ Ballard and, more infamously, the Bay City Rollers, a short-lived 1970s group who purveyed bubble-gum pop to screaming preteens.

Unquestionably, Stanley has been instrumental in launching Kennedy’s career into the stratosphere; equally without doubt it is he who demanded that Kennedy be marketed along the lines of a best-selling pop artist.

Consequently, the March release of Kennedy’s latest recording--of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic conducted by Klaus Tennstedt--has been accompanied by an advertising blitz.

His likeness appears in tabloid newspapers, and on posters in railway stations, bus shelters and London tube stations. (Record stores in the States are using high-profile display racks.) The recording is also pitched on prime-time TV commercials, including ITV’s highly rated “News at Ten” and during live coverage of soccer matches. His record company, EMI, is making the record available to pop radio stations.

“We’re not content to be No. 1 on the classical charts,” said Stanley in a telephone interview. But he balked at the use of the word crossover to define Kennedy’s appeal. “That’s a dodgy word, because the material is not compromised in any way. For instance, in concert we wouldn’t dream of amplifying. But yes, we do turn the house lights down. So what’s all the fuss about?”

The presentation of the Brahms recording, however, illustrates that Kennedy and Stanley do indeed seek a crossover audience. The record’s cover image, duplicated in all its advertising, is a moody black-and-white photo of Kennedy shot by renowned fashion photographer David Bailey. Kennedy’s face is in shadow; he wears a bandanna and sports designer stubble.

Kennedy has written the sleeve notes in a simple manner clearly aimed at non-music lovers: “Like most other people, when I’m listening to great music like Brahms, Bach, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel . . . I discover feelings I didn’t know I had.” Later he adds: “What’s happening, as far as I’m concerned, is that Brahms is allowing himself more time to communicate and explore emotional regions more fully, just as people like Miles Davis and Led Zeppelin did in their music as compared to the people before them.”

Some see this as an example of ceaseless pandering on Kennedy’s and Stanley’s part. The criticism has been heightened by Kennedy’s public demeanor since Stanley took over his career; his adoption of punk fashions and styles, the startling change in his speaking voice from a polite, neutral middle-class accent to a cockney rasp.

Certainly interviewing Kennedy can be laborious. Many writers, while charmed by him, have been exasperated by his refusal to take questions seriously--or even complete a sentence. Kennedy litters his speech with a curiously dated slang, last in vogue among rock performers in the late ‘70s. Words like animal, monster, cool and happening recur like mantras.

Kennedy and Stanley peddle their populist ideals in explanatory “tour books” written for first-time concert-goers. “You’re calling the shots now, blowing the dust from the classics,” writes Stanley in one. Kennedy adds: “You don’t have to stand in a classical shop feeling like a social leper.”

For the cameras, he even adopts a pose not unlike that of a British soccer hooligan when conversation turns to the Birmingham-based soccer club Aston Villa, to which he is fantastically attached. Add to this the fact that Kennedy has a rock artist for a girlfriend--Brix Smith of the Fall, a group led by her estranged husband, Mark E. Smith--and his rebel image seems too perfect, too prefabricated.

To understand this fully, some biographical detail is useful. Kennedy’s mother was a piano teacher and his father a cellist. His parents split when he was a baby, and his mother moved to the Birmingham area. He first played for Yehudi Menuhin at the age of 6, and attended the maestro’s own school. It was there that the seeds of his radical style were planted.

“We had this very kind of disciplinary teacher,” remembers Kennedy. “We used to go on stage and this lady would make sure that our tie was straight and our jacket was straight and I hated playing in jackets because it was more difficult to get at the violin. I found it really kind of uncool and one time, I thought ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and once she closed the door on me and I was on stage, I kind of ripped the jacket off and put it on the floor, ripped the tie off and put it on the floor, and picked up my violin and played.

“The audience really identified with that. They were clapping like crazy before I even played a note because they were just sorry for this kid that had to wear this sorrowful jacket. Then I managed to get away with that for about four gigs, you know, the teacher would be behind the door, but then she started wondering why the applause was going on so long before I played. Then she found out. But that was irrelevant really, I’d found out by then that the audience could identify with me more.”

His fame as a boy wonder spread; when he was 16, a BBC crew started to film his progress over a five-year period. The resulting documentary, “Nigel, You’re Coming Along Nicely,” culminated in his 1977 debut at London’s Festival Hall with Riccardo Muti and the Philharmonia Orchestra; it showed he was not only a prodigious talent but also a lonely isolated boy.

He had an unhappy time at the Juilliard School in New York, and left without a diploma; concert work was already beckoning. In 1980 he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, and in 1986 his recording of the Elgar concerto sold 100,000 copies and was named record of the year by the British magazine Gramophone.

The bizarre stage clothes were the result of an accident. Kennedy had flown to London for a concert from Los Angeles, and had forgotten to pack his tuxedo. “He went shopping on a Sunday and did what he could to get a black outfit,” says Stanley. It wasn’t easy. He came away with a black smoking jacket, a collarless shirt and a fancy waistcoat. A lot of people congratulated him, and told him he was helping shake up the image of classical music. The clothes stayed, and got wilder.

While Kennedy’s cheeky unconventional persona endears him to the British public, the debate continues over whether he is cheapening his music by encouraging the wrong kind of people to buy it for the wrong reasons. Paul Fernandez, assistant manager at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, says: “People come into the store asking for anything by Nigel Kennedy. If there was a record of him tuning up, they’d probably buy that.”

Stanley now aims to broaden the scope of Kennedy’s success. He starts a world tour in August, with his first dates at the Edinburgh Festival, followed by a return next year to the United States where he will perform with the Minnesota Orchestra at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and make his debut with the New York Philharmonic. Again the two men hope to stand the classical music industry on its head. “We have no problem with the public,” says Stanley. “It’s the retailers, the professional music industry, who try to keep Nigel in a little corner.”

Omens for the tour are good. “They love him in Germany,” says Stanley. “We’ve gone double platinum in Holland. Vivaldi’s No. 1 in Japan.” Not bad for a man who describes his work in such a self-deprecating way as Kennedy. He calls himself “a fiddle player.”