Nigel Kennedy: Gives "Four Seasons" away for free

Nigel Kennedy has broken every record imagineable with his rendition of “The Four Seasons” – now he is giving it away for free. Readers of next week’s “Mail on Sunday” will receive the complete version with their copy of the weekly newspaper. This would mean that what is the world’s best-selling classical album ever would add another 400.000 owners to its credit. Sceptics will declare the spectacular another sign that Kennedy’s popularity is waning, but to Kennedy, making his interpretation available to people who would otherwhise never listen to classical music was exactly the point, when his breakthrough album was published in 1989: “It just struck me that the Four Seasons had so much vibrancy and energy that it should appeal to young people”, Kennedy said in an interview for – right – the Mail on Sunday, “It had 12 tracks, each about three minutes long, which were perfect in terms of the format of music and popular culture, just what young people were used to.” In his typical, sympathetically self-absorbed fashion, he stressed the visionary potential of the move at at the time and its revolutionary impact: “No one had tried to make classical music truly popular before – this was 1989, before Pavarotti did anything similar. I talked to my record company and they said, 'Oh, all right, we might sell 50,000 copies'. In the end, we sold two million."

Nigel Kennedy’s “Four Seasons” are still controversial enough to stir up heated debates on internet forums worlwide. While it remains a kind of bible and a reference recording to some, others regard it as a mere publicity stunt and as badly played. Most fail to understand, though, that the work was not even faintly the cashcow or even part of the standard repertoire as it is now. Kennedy certainly broke a couple of dogmas and certainly not just visual ones. With the success he’s had (purportedly, someone was buying the album every 30 seconds in the UK during its one-year stay in the classical charts), he now feels as though his initial sentiments have been confirmed by history: “It felt fucking great to be the architect of a whole new fashion in performing and marketing classical music," Kennedy exclaimed, “It felt great to communicate music and share it with the type of people most of those in the classical hierarchy would want to lock out of the concert chamber.”

Just like he re-recorded a new version of his “Four Seasons”, Nigel Kennedy has also gone back to the Beethoven Violin Concerto and has produced a fresh rendition with the Polish Chamber Orchestra. More news on that soon.

Homepage: Nigel Kennedy
Homepage: Nigel Kennedy at the Mail on Sunday
By Tobias Fischer, published 2008-03-03

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