Nigel Kennedy Quotations

Why would you want to stand there waving a stick when you could be playing an instrument?

If you're playing within your capability, what's the point? If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

I'm always improving and I want to get better and never hit a plateau. I find it an amazing adventure.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.

I hate complacency. I play every gig as if it could be my last, then I enjoy it more than ever.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so its difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

The Four Seasons was making me popular in Britain, but EMI America had no interest in making that happen in the States, so I just had a classical career there.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.

If you're not pushing your own technique to its own limits with the risk that it might just crumble at any moment, then you're not really doing your job.

I don't think I am going to play in London with an orchestra until I can be assured that I'm getting adequate rehearsal,"" declares Kennedy. ""And if that's never, I won't play in London with an English orchestra. I'll have to bring one in from somewhere else.

I think it's more important that I don't forget my ideals as a true musician. Will people forget me or not is not so important to me as staying true to my ideals as a musician, that's what people made remember me in the first place. Every now and again I will have to risk that people forget me, because I will stay true to my ideals as a musician. Without those I wouldn't have reached anybody in the first place.

My violin is called Kylie as she sounds great and is perfectly formed.

No, I'm not leaving the electric violin to Vanessa Mae. I'm still playing quite a lot of electric stuff. But only when there is a need for it. I like rocking out. And the electric violin is useful for many other things. It's useful for really good effects and it's also great for rocking out, with the drums and the bass, get into really heavy stuff. At the moment I'm not really doing any projects involving that thing.

The Beatles are a classical group because they're classic.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

The Guarneri is a fantastic instrument, both for playing classical music and for what I'm doing now. It's great for playing improvised music on, cause you get such great response. And for the same reason it's great for classical music too. It's a good violin.