Polish hills alive with sound of violin music

LIVING in the Polish mountains clearly suits virtuoso musician Nigel Kennedy.

The 67-year-old, who will headline on the final night of the Henley Festival on Sunday, spends most of his time in the mountains in Malopolska, south-east of Kraków, with his wife, Agnieszka, a lawyer.

“It’s all good over here in Poland,” he says. “It’s nice because we’ve still got the old agricultural land and it has not all been ‘touristed’ out of existence.

“We just had all our fields cut because it’s time to do that and they take bales of hay and have it for the long winter. We let this guy bring his sheep on here.

“I’ve always been surrounded by hills. I was in Malvern before and now we’re here in a mountain area.

“We don’t really have a flooding problem, unlike Henley, because we’re so high up. We just watch the water go down the hill and see what happens down there.”

Kennedy, who is the bestselling classical violinist of all time thanks to his 1989 recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, is looking forward to being on the “floating” stage on Sunday night — his second time at the festival.

“Henley, that’s going to be the scene of the crime, if we’re lucky,” he laughs. “One time when we were there, it was a proper summer’s day and my driver dived into the river. Then he realised he had got all his clothes on and he had nothing to change into. He was like a born-again Jacques Cousteau.”

The violinist is the son of John Kennedy, who was principal cellist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Scylla Stoner, a pianist.

At age seven, he became a pupil of Yehudi Menuhin at his school of music in Surrey.

When he was 13, Menuhin invited French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli to the school to play and Nigel ended up in an impromptu jamming session with him and they became lifelong friends.

Nigel says: “It was a fantastic experience meeting Yehudi, who was so open-minded.

“Probably the most I learnt from him was outside of music in many ways because with music, you’ve got to make up your own mind about what you want to do and you put your style and interpretation on songwriting or whatever.

“You can’t really learn it off other people, you kind of know what you want to say and then you say it.

“In those days, in the early Seventies, it was a real mixed culture school that I went to and he was very open to other forms of music than just classical.

“So I learnt that from him that people are what they’re worth, they’re not what the outside of the person looks like, you know?

“From Yehudi I definitely learnt tolerance. If somebody’s an expletive then they’re an expletive but it’s nothing to do with who their parents were or what part of the world they come from, you know.

“With Stéphane, I learnt to love the moment and that was also something which is not just musical.

“You know, we’re lucky to be alive every day and to carry on having a chance at doing something we love doing.

“I had beautiful messages from each of them and I was very lucky to have been in the right place and the right time to meet them cats.”

Kennedy plays jazz and klezmer as well as classical music and has a passion for rock, especially his hero Jimi Hendrix.

“I never met him but he opened my mind in so many ways,” he says. “I mean, you know, a song like Little Wing, I can hear it as a Celtic melody because of my Irish background.

“His music is so open that there’s many different ways of doing it and he was a guy with bigger ears than an elephant.

“He kind of invented a lot of aspects of rock ’n’ roll and blues and fused it all together just by being himself and it just opens doors. Some music is very specific and it’s exactly what it is, whereas with Hendrix there are no real barriers or boundaries to the music.”

The violinist is known for his unconventional dress on stage and, unlike the men in the audience on Sunday night, won’t be obeying the rules of black tie.

“I actually don’t have a tie, you know, so I’m hoping that I can be filtering through the dress code in my normal manner,” he says.

“I have been turned away from one or two music halls in the past because they thought I was some kind of vagrant trying to nick something from backstage.

“Yehudi was a little bit upset when I stopped wearing the classical get-up. Stéphane was always very elegant but more with paisley shirts and stuff.

“They were both very elegant people but I think they loved music more than they loved clothes. I was never going to look good, even if I wore a suit, so like they forgave me on that score and we just made music together.”

So what about his set?

“I’ll include a good mix, you know, so there will definitely be some Jimi. There will be a composer I love a lot called Ryuichi Sakamoto from Yellow Magic Orchestra. I’ll probably drop a bit of Bach and it’s quite likely a bit of Vivaldi might come up. I’ll probably play Summer because I’m hoping for a summer’s day, you know, so maybe it’s good voodoo.

“I will include some of my own melodies because I write very melodic shit and quite a lot of it is kind of inspired by pastoral, open views of nature, so a bit of that might come out.

“It’s going to be a beautiful, relaxed day and everybody will be out there having a great time.”

Nature plays an important part in his life in Poland.

He says: “I’ve just been inspecting the tractor doing all the harvesting of the grass and making sure he doesn’t cut down things that are valuable to us, like our house.

“It’s beautiful up here — you can walk out the back of the land that we’ve got and then you’re just in wilderness.

“There are wolves up there, there’s bears, wild boar and deer, you know, we’ve got all of these species and we’re pretty keen that they can carry on living in this environment, so we’re keeping the land fit for purpose.

“I feed the birds a lot and it’s so beautiful when you can hear them.

“I practise outdoors like most of the time for many reasons. I don’t like claustrophobia much and there’s no acoustic outdoors unless you’re playing in a valley or something, so you can actually hear what you’re doing and then you can be more objectively critical of what type of sound you’re making.

“When I’m sitting out there, playing my fiddle, the birds do tend to come along and there’s a bit of call and answer sometimes, which is really nice.

“The violin pitch is much closer to birdsong. For the cello, the birds must think of it as something like a dodo or an albatross or something and the clarinet is great because in klezmer, for instance, it really mimics a lot of the sounds that one would hear from nature. It’s really cool.”

• Nigel Kennedy: Musical Adventure is at the Henley Festival on Sunday at 7pm. For more information and to buy tickets, visit
henley-festival.co.uk