Here, at the Western edge of the country, we have no hurricanes, only
earthquakes.  Except when Kennedy (The Artist Formerly Known As Nigel)
comes around.  He did tonight, allegedly to play the Brahms Violin Concerto
with the San Francisco Symphony, and leaving a wide path of adoring rubble
in his wake.  I've been hanging out at Davies Hall since it opened, and I
have never witnessed an instant, spontaneous, universal, loud, and
unceasing ovation like this.

Kennedy played a brilliant encore (not too many violinists follow the
Brahms with something -- anything -- else), took more bows, finally asked
the audience to let the Symphony have the overdue intermission.  The Davies
audience, rarely acting like this, gave the impression of celebrating a
combination of Elvis and hometown boys Ricci, Menuhin and Stern.  This,
after all, is a town that knows from violin.

Kennedy is no novelty in San Francisco:  he has appeared here over the
years, at first as "interesting" and strange -- combat boots, spiked hair,
good playing -- then he disappeared for five years, and came back in glory
two years ago, to play a heavenly Beethoven concerto with Michael Tilson
Thomas on the podium.

Those early tropical-storm appearances and the 1997 "comeback" had almost
nothing to do with tonight.  This was unique, even for him.  It left me
with a deep impression and serious confusion.

The thing is that the "bad" part tonight was not just what Joshua Kosman
so aptly describes as "Emmett Kelly chic." (For details, see below, if
you must.)

The confusing, disturbing part is that there were a few real *musical*
problems:  wrong notes, bad intonation, capricious dynamics, ugly sounds,
an attempt to destroy the violin, and a terribly annoying skating/flamenco
thing around the stage.  Interspersed with all that were long passages of
absolute purity, a voice heroic and lyrical in turn, music-making of the
highest order.  Very good and very bad all rolled into one, a bizarre,
compelling, fascinating performance.

But here is what is essential:

Unless you read about it, you'd never know that this was Kennedy's fourth
Brahms in as many days, and probably one of many during his career.  There
was nothing routine, rote, bored or boring about it -- this was a premiere,
a debut performance.  It was unsettling, exciting, memorable.  To do that
with a 120-year-old piece of music after rehearsals and three performances
since Thursday takes a rare kind of genius.

So forget the pants that are three inches short (all the better to
display the mismatched socks), the jacket sleeves pulled up to the
shoulders, the new mohawk-spiked 'do (clearly triumphing over whatever
Peter Sellars can come up with), the spotted cravats wrapped around both
as a belt and as a kind of vest -- forget all that.  Try to get over the
opening:  very big, heated, and with as ugly a sound as you'll ever hear.
Try to ignore his tearing into the instrument with such force that a string
is broken, along with a piece of wood (from a distance, it looked like the
bridge came off) -- and then admire the speed with which Kennedy trust the
wounded instrument into concertmaster Mark Volkert's left hand, grabbing
his violin from the right hand, and missing just a couple of notes.
(Volkert did a fabulous repair job mid-concert, and returned the instrument
in a few minutes.  But why should it be the concertmaster who is taken out
of action like this? Isn't he the most indispensable member of the
section?)

By the time Kennedy got to the cadenza, he settled down to some stunning
work, and at the end of it, he produced timeless seconds of a sound as
pure as I heard from any violin, ever.  The Adagio sang with unsentimental
lyricism, the closing Allegro was fabulously flowing with energy, not the
all-too-frequent circus music.  No Emmett Kelly stuff here.

For the record, Andreas Delfs was making his conducting debut, but I
haven't seen anybody in the audience or in the orchestra pay any attention
to him.  Even after the concerto, it was Kennedy who motioned oboist
William Bennett for a well-deserved bow.

And then the encore:  the same Milt Jackson "Bags' Groove" with SFS
principal bassist Michael Burr that the two performed in 1997, but this
time in memory of the great MJQ vibraphonist who died a couple of weeks
ago.  This too was music-on-fire; an usher who heard the encore on all four
nights said that Kennedy and Burr were "rocking" tonight as never before.

Janos Gereben/SF
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