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Lakatos group glides from Gypsy rock to Brahms

MUSIC REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 30, 2012|By Jeffrey Gantz

Roby Lakatos and his ensemble performed at Sanders Theatre on Friday. (LAKATOS VZW )

CAMBRIDGE - With his laughing eyes and handlebar mustache and miniature Vandyke beard, Roby Lakatos looks like the subject of a Frans Hals portrait. Born into a family of Gypsy violinists in Hungary in 1965, he studied at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest, so of course he does classical. (Yehudi Menuhin was an admirer, and there’s a Lakatos composition called “A Minute for Menuhin.’’) But he does pop. He does jazz. He does klezmer. (On his “Klezmer Karma’’ album, he has a piece called “Klezmer Csárdás.’’) He does Russian. He does movie themes. He does opera. He’s performed with everyone from Joshua Bell and the Dresden Philharmonic to Herbie Hancock and Stéphane Grappelli.

Friday evening at Sanders Theatre, in a Celebrity Series appearance that marked his Boston-area debut, the Roby Lakatos Ensemble did a little bit of everything, from tango to Michel Legrand to Rimsky-Korsakov. Unfortunately, they did it with a degree of amplification that didn’t sort well with the Sanders acoustic. The lineup - Lakatos with László Bóni on second violin, Kalman Cséki on piano, Jenö István Lisztes on cimbalom, László Balogh on guitar, and László Lajos Lisztes on double bass - produced an unpleasant blend of timbres, and too often everybody seemed to be trying to talk at the same time, burying all those gloriously schmaltzy Gypsy harmonies. Even when Lakatos took the spotlight, with minimal accompaniment, his tone had a harsh edge, as opposed to the whispery whine of an acoustic violin.

But he and his Ensemble sure can play, and they had no trouble getting the audience to clap along as they served up high-octane Gypsy rock and Gypsy jazz. Cséki had one break that could have been a respectable outtake from Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, and when he jammed with Balogh and László Lajos Lisztes, they sounded like a classy jazz trio. Lakatos did milk some sweetness from Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance’’ No. 5 and the first encore, “Ochi chorniye.’’ And in the second encore, “The Lark,’’ he climbed even higher than Ralph Vaughan Williams does in “The Lark Ascending.’’

The only thing faster than Lakatos’s flying fingers were Jenö István Lisztes’s flying mallets. In his jawdropping solo section of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee,’’ those mallets were a blur. Even Lisztes’s hands were a blur. Yet you could make out every whir of wing, and every pollen-laden stamen.