34 Quotes by Nigel Kennedy

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.