Talented Violinists Get Back on Track

Once upon a time, back in the 1980s before Baroque singers marketed themselves as bimbos, before nubile young violinists posed for provocative CD covers, there were Nige and Nadja, the original bad boy and bad girl of the violin.

First there was Nigel Kennedy the good boy. In 1984, still in his 20s, he recorded Elgar’s outsize, rapturous 1910 Violin Concerto in a performance that spoke directly to traditionalist hearts. It was beautifully played, well controlled yet full of emotion. Here, without a doubt, was Britain’s next great violinist.

It was also something of an act. Having led a repressed childhood as a prodigy, Kennedy ultimately rebelled. While still a good boy, he developed worrisome obsessions with pop music and his local soccer team. Then suddenly, he spiked his hair and took to wearing punk clothes onstage. He was a sensation, the violinist everyone loved--or loved to hate.

Things started going wrong for him after a while. The punk thing became dated. He hated the pressure from his controlling record company, EMI. Six years ago, he quit classical music.

I interviewed Kennedy just as he was turning to pop full time. The interview took place late at night in a London recording studio, where the violinist and a rock band were jamming. There was the obligatory groupie, with her pet rat on her shoulder. Kennedy drove a BMW with a back seat full of garbage, mostly decaying fast-food containers. He seemed glum, and he was little heard from until he released a fascinating pop record, “Kafka,” last year. Its influences range from Stephane Grappelli to Jimi Hendrix, but it has languished inappropriately in the New Age bins.

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s story is somewhat different. She came on the scene as a street-savvy young violinist with a wild stage presence. She too quickly became a phenomenon, going on the late-night talk-show circuit as a classical musician with an attitude. She could be down-to-earth, even vulgar, the way classical musicians weren’t supposed to be. She liked baseball a lot.

Salerno-Sonnenberg had the same record company as Kennedy, and it exploited her as well, hyping that tough-girl image. Increasingly, her live performances became a potpourri of extreme mannerisms. She was popular but, like Kennedy, she started having trouble being taken seriously by either classical or pop followers. She became more and more cocky, more and more desperate-seeming.

Three years ago, disaster struck. Careless in the kitchen, she sliced a finger with a knife, and her career was suddenly in peril. She too disappeared from the scene.

Now, Nige and Nadja are back, reinvented for the end of the ‘90s. Actually, “reinvented’ might be the wrong word. From the evidence of these two very interesting, strongly played and original new CDs, they’ve found themselves, matured.

Nige has rethought his name and is just Kennedy now. And he has also rethought the Elgar Violin Concerto, this time with the inspired collaboration of Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony. Kennedy’s playing is no longer nice. It is raw, emotional, in your face. It is indulgent; it sounds as if the violinist is figuring it out as he goes, like the improvising rock and jazz musician he sometimes is. Yet the control is still there, and Rattle expertly gives Kennedy all the slack he needs while making sure he is reined in when that is necessary. And if Elgar’s concerto does not sound, in Kennedy’s interpretation, like its usual “proper” self, there is good reason for that.

Elgar wrote it as an outpouring of passion for a woman he loved. Her name was Alice, but she wasn’t the Alice he married. And Kennedy zeros right in on this subtext, not only the exultation but also the anguish. It is Kennedy’s bold intention to demonstrate that under Elgar’s defender-of-the-Empire surface is angst as modern as that of any German modernist.

No one has ever captured this so dramatically in the concerto before, in playing equally disturbing and magnificent. And what better way to break a listener’s heart than to follow it with the longest, most still performance on disc of Vaughan Williams’ mystical representation of the English countryside?

Salerno-Sonnenberg’s return to concert life hasn’t been quite so dramatic. The finger healed, after all, and she still gets up on the stage and squeezes every ounce of effect from a concerto. But, like Kennedy, she is now doing it with more maturity. She has also, thanks to the inexhaustible imagination of the folks at Nonesuch, found just the kind of crossover project in which she can excel.

There is nothing quite like this new “Humoresque” CD. It is not so much film music as a project inspired by a film. The movie is the eponymous 1946 classic in which John Garfield portrays a young, scrappy violinist on the way up. The one in which a heartbroken Joan Crawford walks into the ocean while Garfield (dubbed by Isaac Stern) and Oscar Levant are joint soloists with an orchestra in Carnegie Hall playing a glamorous fantasy on themes from Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.”

Salerno-Sonnenberg explains that she has long identified with Paul Boray, the brilliant, stormy and driven protagonist of the film. “Whether I like it or not, it’s where I live,” she writes in the notes to the CD. And that admission puts her career in striking new perspective.

The music on the disc includes arrangements of classics made by Franz Waxman for the film. But it also sounds written just for Salerno-Sonnenberg--especially Waxman’s irresistible fantasies on “Carmen” and “Tristan,” and his bluesy arrangement of Dvorak’s “Humoresque.”

There is more than enough room here for a violinist to pour out as much emotion as she wants, and Salerno-Sonnenberg does so in a wondrous torrent. Amazingly, she turns what might have been mere camp into a compulsively listenable and overwhelmingly emotional display of dazzling violin playing.

So, do Nige and Nadja live happily ever after? Could be. They went astray but in going astray survived the ordeals necessary to become true to themselves and their art. Didn’t Mozart once write an opera about something like that, with a flute instead of a violin in it?

Recordings are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good), four stars (excellent).