When you go to a Nigel Kennedy concert you know you’re not going to get period Vivaldi. Piano, drum kit and microphones litter the stage as the audience waits for the rock-star violinist who is – fashionably – 20 minutes late.

The band assembles before Kennedy bounces onto the stage in a black leather jacket and lurid green sneakers, flanked by two strumming guitarists – Julian Buschberger and Mario Lattuada. The strumming becomes a jam, Kennedy stamping his feet and blowing a whistle, back to the audience, before Tomasz Kupiec’s plucked bass joins the fray and Kennedy switches to violin. The layers build and the music suddenly bursts into the first movement of Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Late or not, Kennedy performs with incredible energy. He dances around the stage, horse hair flying as he duels with the First Violin – Australian violinist and Sydney Con graduate Sonja Schebeck – and takes a pause in the birdlike figurations to grin at the audience with a wry: “tweet, tweet.” And he can certainly play: Vivaldi’s virtuosic passage-work becomes shredding solos in his hands.

^{Nigel Kennedy and band, photo by Anna Kucera}

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