The portrait on the front of this double-CD package is of Nigel Kennedy – the use of his Christian name is once again sanctioned – with his face daubed with stripes of maroon and blue paint looking more like a native American warrior than a loyal Aston Villa football fan, apparently trying to take a bite out of his violin.

Yet turn inside the booklet, and one discovers a most touching 1964 photo of the very youthful prodigy together with his mentors Yehudi Menuhin and Robert Masters (as well as one taken years later with Menuhin at the Gramophone Awards). We also have from the mid-1980s Kennedy’s performance of the Adagio from his inspirational first recording of the Elgar Concerto, made with Vernon Handley and the LPO: this track demonstrates that, like Menuhin before him, Kennedy’s deep musical instincts could produce a performance of extraordinary depth of feeling and insight, to say nothing of absolute technical command, at the outset of a career which had begun in the concert hall in 1977.

The first of these two CDs, opening with the unbuttoned vitality of the first movement from ‘Spring’ of The Four Seasons, offers mostly short encore pieces in which the masterful technique and natural feeling for a melodic contour are well demonstrated. Almost all have charisma, with the brief Bach excerpt anticipating an ongoing project to record all that composer’s solo works. Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending soars aloft radiantly; if it is also warmly romanticised, it is very beautiful, and raptly serene at the close. Two of the shorter examples of Kennedy’s rich espressivo on the first disc are Massenet’s ‘Méditation’ (with a discreet choral backing) and a ravishing performance of the Londonderry Air.

The second CD, with excerpts from half-a-dozen major 19th-century concertos, confirms that this remarkably talented violinist has matured musically far more than one would expect from the visual and spoken image he still seems anxious to project. Among the recordings included, it is again the Romantic repertoire that suits him best. The ardently passionate account of the Adagio of the Bruch G minor Concerto and the magically coloured ‘Canzonetta’ of the Tchaikovsky remain in the memory. In the booklet Kennedy provides a personal note for each item, but it is Sir George Martin who makes the pertinent comment about Kennedy’s ability to communicate to a younger generation: ‘When I went to hear him perform the Berg Concerto in the Royal Festival Hall, I was delighted to see that the audience was, in the main, composed of people under the age of 30.’