Gramophone magazine gave it the ‘Record of the Year’ Award, and it received a gong from the early years of the Brit Awards for ‘Best Classical Recording’. It was Foster who championed Nigel’s recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, made at a fortnight’s notice in 1984. He left the hothouse environment at Stoke d’Abernon with his individuality intact and came to the notice of Simon Foster, the A&R manager at EMI’s budget classical label, Classics for Pleasure. And then there was Nigel Kennedy, a pupil of the Yehudi Menuhin School whose star was about to rise. Pundits had predicted a classical music boom, courtesy of the new digital sound carrier, the compact disc, but no one could foresee a world in which Three Tenors, glamorous violinists and Welsh mezzo-sopranos would dominate the pop charts. His death on 16 July marked the passing from the world of maestros to that of megastars. In 1989, the classical music industry came to terms with life after Herbert von Karajan. It topped the UK classical chart for over a year and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the bestselling classical recording ever. Nigel Kennedy’s recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons sold over three million copies around the world. It was the first time that commercial pop marketing techniques had been used in the classical world and the first time that Nigel was unleashed on the media. Vivaldi’s work, 12 movements in short three-minute bursts, was tailor-made for commercial radio. Originally recorded in November 1986 in the Church of St John-at-Hackney, London, it was a recording that would achieve unprecedented public and media attention and change the course of music history. Nigel Kennedy’s recording was released on 25th September 1989 and went on to become one of the best-selling classical albums of all-time, selling over three million copies around the world.
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