Nigel Kennedy

“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.”

“I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.”

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

“Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.”

“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.”

“I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.”

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

“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.”

“If you do the same thing every night, that's the death of music.”

“Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.”

“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.”

“Menuhin was playing Bach on a fantastic spiritual level when he was a teenager.”

“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.”

“You can't learn pathos or profundity.”

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

“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.”

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