Nigel Kennedy Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“You can't learn pathos or profundity.”

“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.”

“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.”