BOOKS

Nigel Kennedy Uncensored!

Nigel Kennedy

320PP ISBN 9781781558560

FONTHILL MEDIA £25

How to approach this book, mostly written in a sort of potty-mouthed patois that I find off-putting and infantile? Perhaps, without straying too far into amateur psychology, I can winkle out a few of the reasons why Nigel Kennedy seems desperate to be liked and acquire ‘street cred’.

You have to get to page 75 to discover that Nigel’s Australian father John – RPO principal cellist – abandoned his mother early on. These six pages, which purport to be written from beyond the grave by his grandfather Lauri, one of the best cellists of the interwar years, shows that Nigel, now 65, can produce perfectly decent prose when he wants to. That Nigel uses this chapter to boost his own ego is just one of the annoyances a reader must deal with.

Trying to bring up her son on £5 a month sent to her by John, Nigel’s mother married again – and the boy was landed with the stepfather from hell, who beat his mother up and, when Nigel tried to intervene, went for him with a knife, causing the ten-year-old to spend a night sleeping rough in the park. By then he had been sent to the Menuhin School, which comes across as a pretty chaotic institution in those days. He preferred playing jazz with Stéphane Grappelli – Menuhin himself, whom he claims to admire, was very patient with him – but somehow emerged with credit.

Thousands of students have seemingly thrived at Juilliard, but for our Nige the whole set-up was a hive of ‘Musical Mediocrity’ and all the other students were inferior to him. Dorothy DeLay is the trigger for him to make an obvious play on her name – which he rather spoils by repeating 146 pages later.

The BBC comes in for a good dose of his ire, especially one particular controller (if it was the man I think it was, I have some small sympathy with Nige). His assumed persona, a Punk Violinist, was never going to thrill the powers-that-be.

A fresh-faced Nigel Kennedy in 1987

GRAEME MONTGOMERY/EMI

He is inordinately proud of his first recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a best-seller through adroit EMI marketing, and gives all his concerto recordings rave reviews. I have met people, otherwise uninterested in classical music, who have bought and enjoyed Kennedy CDs, so perhaps his poses have paid off. But much of this book, which digresses into football, jazz, rock music, boxing and so on, is like ten-year-old Nigel spitting in the faces of a profession and industry that have given him a very good living. Along the way he makes valid points, for example about musical education, but submerges them in his mode of baby talk. More than 80 photos are well reproduced in two sections printed on art paper.

TULLY POTTER

Audition Day: Your Guide for a Successful Orchestral Cello Audition Blaise Déjardin

111PP ISBN 9780578955698

OPUS CELLO $40

If you have been offered an audition for a cello position in a professional orchestra, Blaise Déjardin, a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2008 and its principal cello for the past five years, has created the perfect guide to achieving your goal.

In the first third of his book, Déjardin offers a world of advice about preparing for your audition, coping with nerves, keeping calm on the audition day itself and dealing with making mistakes. Part Two is a compilation of the 36 orchestral excerpts most commonly requested at auditions, printed alphabetically from Beethoven to Wagner. Interestingly there is nothing more recent than Ravel’s La Valse.

Déjardin is obviously a highly organised person who believes that thorough preparation over several months is key. From suggested daily practice plans and making multiple recordings of each excerpt, to how to organise your folder on the day, every detail is covered. He is also able to include fascinating insider knowledge on exactly what to expect on the day of the audition: playing behind a screen to avoid bias on the part of the panel; waiting to see if you have been selected for the next round; and only being allowed to ask the panel questions by proxy so as not to reveal your identity.

The orchestral excerpts make an invaluable collection for amateur orchestral cellists as well as those preparing for professional auditions. The book is spiral-bound so that it opens out easily on the music stand; each excerpt is on a right-hand page, printed at a clearly legible size with plenty of space between the staves for annotations, and with Déjardin’s advice on the opposite page.

He starts with Focal Points – the particular qualities that the panel is likely to be looking for, such as dynamics, legato and precision for the opening of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro overture – and goes on to give detailed advice about what to work on when practising them, down to intensity of vibrato and how to play particular accents. Suggested bowings and fingerings are also included. Unfortunately not all the excerpts have bar numbers included, which makes for time-consuming bar counting when Déjardin refers to these. That aside, this is certainly a well-conceived and very userfriendly book.

JANET BANKS

Top Banana Celia Cobb, Naomi Yandell Stainer & Bell

VIOLIN PART 28PP ISMN 9790220227424 £8.95

VIOLA PART 28PP ISMN 9790220227431 £8.95

CELLO PART 28PP ISMN 9790220227448 £8.95

ALL PIANO PARTS 42PP £10.95 EACH:

VIOLIN ISMN 9790220227455

VIOLA ISMN 9790220227462

CELLO ISMN 9790220227479

Celia Cobb and Naomi Yandell have done it again. Here is another volume that will both delight and inform the young string player. It also expands the repertoire for teachers looking for pieces that are fun while, as is always the case with Cobb and Yandell, keeping sound pedagogy at the heart of the message.

Top Banana is a set of 20 concert pieces at the level of ABRSM grades 1 and 2, designed to light the fire of musical creativity and communication in young players. In every piece there is something that will wow an audience and encourage the performer to think and feel beyond their own instrument. In Fanfare, the performance direction is ‘Bold as brass’; players are exhorted to sound not like a cellist or violist but like a trumpet, and also not to sound too pretty. Later in the volume, ‘ghastly’ sounds are called for. Extremes of dynamics are everywhere. In Spooky Story one can sense the trepidation in the pianissimo footsteps, before a door slams or something jumps out; while in Emerald Sea, the final notes are marked ‘al niente’, to create one of those magical effects where the music carries on long after the final notes have finished sounding.

It is all very well writing music full of ideas and extremes; it is another to make it really doable. The musical demands in each piece are designed to promote healthy improvement of technique as well. There are plenty of harmonics and glissandos that help to develop freedom of movement and easy hand positions. Playable double-stops are introduced, and there are first steps towards many bow techniques too.

Each piece comes with a few points or ideas for the pupil and teacher to explore as they start to learn the music. In the eponymous Top Banana one instruction: ‘enjoy the snap pizzicato on the last note – count carefully’ promotes the fun while gently reminding the player of the timing. These helpful and always positive notes are no more than a sentence or two each. This will allow plenty of room for a teacher to take ideas further, or bring their own to the pupil, as well as letting the pupil add their own thoughts and personality to the performances.

These pieces can be taught to more than one pupil at a time and also to small ensembles. There are many places where notes differ from violin to viola to cello, but they all fit together. This said, the strength of these pieces is not really that they can be played with mixed forces (there is no double bass volume); they are best viewed as performance pieces for the young soloist. The first ten pieces are about Grade 1 level while the second ten are about Grade 2. I would not be at all surprised if some of these wonderful pieces made an appearance in the next exam syllabuses.

ALEX LAING