Nigel Kennedy's preference to Live Performances

Nigel Kennedy was attacked for his approach to classical music by John Drummond in 1991, calling him "a Liberace for the Nineties" and criticised his "ludicrous clothes and grotesque, self-invented accent. Until 2006 he had expressed his intention of not appearing on the classical London concert scene with a London orchestra, seen by some arrogance and stated by Kennedy in terms of frustrated perfectionism: "It all comes down to the amount of rehearsal you get, or don't get, in this country. I insist on three or four sessions prior to a concert, and orchestral administrators won't accommodate that. If I didn't care about getting it right I could do three concerts in the same amount of time and earn three times the money. But you can't do something properly in less time than it takes. Kennedy expresses a preference for the immediate appeal of live performance, and often records entire works or movements in single 'takes' to preserve this sense in his recordings. He also introduces improvisatory elements in his performances, as in his Jimi Hendrix-inspired cadenza to the Beethoven Violin Concerto and his jazz and fusion recordings.

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