Review: Nigel Kennedy *****

NIGEL Kennedy, with his punkish hair, trousers decorated with safety pins and Doc Marten boots, has an approach and style that’s about moving with the movements and using a piece’s basic shape as a departure point. This show consists of his own composition The Four Elements and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to start an amazing musical journey. Accompanied by the marvellous strings of the Orchestra of Life, two sets of drums, two electric guitars, a jazz trumpeter, the percussionist from Massive Attack, and four singers with voices blended into the whole like another instrument, Kennedy moves between his Stradivarius and an electric violin, which is at times boosted into wailing effects by a Moog synthesiser controlled by foot pedals. Despite the pyrotechnics, the energy, earthiness and sheer brilliance of the music-making are what lure you in and fix your whole attention on this ensemble and the man in the middle with the sorcerer’s command of all about him. His 2012 take on the Four Seasons is intensely flavoursome and urgent, peppered with bongos and trumpet, and interrupted now and then for a side order of something else. One such detour is via a couple of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, sublime musical conversations between Kennedy and the gifted cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska. New sounds, semi-improvised riffs (full marks to orchestra leader Lizzie Ball for following Kennedy’s mercurial cues), a touch of Hendrix here, a spot of Duke Ellington there. These musicians had a ball, and so did we.