Pam’s discovery, the Roby Lakatos Ensemble, who we heard with Matt and Maktaaq at the Chan Centre last year, is performing in Carnegie Hall in New York City this coming week.
From This Week on 96.3 FM WQXR:
The Roby Lakatos Ensemble
The Roby Lakatos Ensemble — Photo by Lakatos vzwGypsy violinist Roby Lakatos is not only a scorching virtuoso, but a musician of extraordinary stylistic versatility. He’s a gypsy violinist, a classical virtuoso, a jazz improviser, a composer and arranger, and a 19th-century throwback all at once. Click here to see how he performs Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5. Carnegie Hall presents Roby Lakatos and Friends as part of three festival series in Stern Auditorium this Tuesday, and the Roby Lakatos Ensemble is in concert at the State Theater in New Jersey this Thursday. But before you see him there, hear him on WQXR. Roby and his ensemble join Elliott Forrest for live performances in our studio on Monday, January 26th at 4:30 P.M.
Those concertgoers in New York and New Jersey are in for a treat. Lakatos really is a stunning performer, and his ensemble’s Cimbalom player may have been the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a human moving at superhuman speed. He was literally a blur. It was also a revelation to hear the music that Brahms and Liszt based their Hungarian Rhapsodies on, real, alive and performed with the same passion and agility that those composers who heard were so thrilled by. Not only did the music that Lakatos plays have a huge influence on the development of music in the Romantic era, but it’s just plain fun and never boring.
My parents heard some Gyspy ensembles when they were vacationing in Hungary years ago and were also blown away. It’s remarkable how this music has survived all of these centuries intact.