Increasingly
prolific Roby Lakatos here explores the affinities, cross-currents
and musical symbioses of Gypsy and Jewish music. He joins
with the singer and actress Myriam Fuks, to whom Lakatos
pays fulsome tribute, and who was responsible for promoting
the newly arrived violinist when he appeared in Brussels
as a seventeen year old. Aldo Granato also plays a powerful
part and his accordion playing exerts its own evocative spell.
The Lakatos ensemble, now finely honed, naturally join them
as does less predictably the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra
and its leader János Rolla.
There
is a deal of variety here. Lakatos plays a poignant obbligato
to Fuks’s vocal on Yiddishe Mame alongside some tenser
harmonic material before they edge toward an unbridled tango
that suits the accordion perfectly. Tango and a certain Parisian
feel warmly enclose Neshumele. And if anything demonstrates
the coalescence of musics and traditions it’s the Papirossen Suite,
a supposedly Jewish song but one that all the gypsies and
Hungarians know as their own. They play it thus as well,
a kind of bipartite arrangement with Lakatos first laying
on Jewish ardour, followed by a kind of bridge passage from
the chamber orchestra and then a gypsy ferment to end.
One
of Laktos’s most impressive moments comes in his own Klezmer
Suite No.2, a co-composition with Ferenc Javori and full
of some burnished attaca playing. The violinist’s own Empty
Pictures is a wistful oasis, quiet and limpid. The jazziest
track is Hatikvah, an intriguing playground for the
guitarist Attila Ronto to stretch out. And Fuks’s most vital
vocal moments come in Budapest. Disappointment comes
in the shape of funk guitar in Yiddishe Hassene, an
aberration of some magnitude.
Throughout
in fact I felt the chamber orchestral support merely added
a tissue of refinement and not much else. And to be blunt
this is not Lakatos’s most inspiring moment on disc, nor
that of his band, which sounds oddly subdued. The Gypsy-Jewish
nexus might have proved rather more fruitful had an arranger
really got to grips with the material and produced something
viably alive. Treating songs episodically, gypsy-style then
Jewish-style, is not really the most creative answer. Extending
things to include Tango diffuses the focus still further
and veers dangerously close to Piazzolla. The funk guitar
is an embarrassment. No one wants to box Lakatos into a stylistic
corner but here he is only variably convincing.
Jonathan
Woolf
Roby Lakatos
and Ensemble 
[70:58] 
