One fast fiddler
The Spokane Symphony has subtitled Saturday’s Super Pops concert with Roby Lakatos as “A Wild Gypsy Fiddler.”
“Wild” referring, mostly, to the man’s fingers.
“It’s actually mind-blowing,” says Morihiko Nakahara, the symphony’s associate conductor.
“Some of our musicians had seen clips of him on YouTube and they were just shaking their heads,” Nakahara says. “They said, ‘We didn’t know you could go that fast.’
“And he does it with dead-on accuracy. That’s the scary part.”
European audiences have known about Lakatos for decades. He’s from a legendary Roma musical family and has been dazzling audiences in Brussels and Budapest for years with what critics call his “finger-blurring virtuosity.”
He also sells tons of CDs in Japan, says Nakahara.
“He can do all of these weird pizzicato (plucking) things in which he doesn’t look like he’s playing the violin anymore,” Nakahara says. “It looks like he’s playing the banjo.”
Lakatos’ talent encompasses the classical repertoire as well. He studied at the Bela Bartok Conservatory in Budapest and has been compared to the great Paganini.
His jazz credentials are equally strong: He has played with, and has been compared to, the great Stephane Grappelli.
All of these sides of Lakatos will be on display Saturday night as he brings his blazing-fast fiddle to the INB Performing Arts Center stage.
He’ll perform with his own ensemble, featuring guitar, bass, piano and cimbalom (an Eastern European instrument similar to a hammered dulcimer), backed by the orchestra on most numbers.
Lakatos’ musical credentials are impressive, beginning with his birth into a Hungarian family descended from the 18th century’s “King of the Gypsy Violinists,” Janos Bihari.
He began playing at age 9 and was soon the first violin in a local band. At the Bartok Conservatory, he won first prize for classical violin in 1984.
From 1986 to 1996, Lakatos and his ensemble were the resident musicians at “Les Ateliers de la Grande Ille,” a Russian restaurant in Brussels. Since then, he has performed around the world, although Nakahara says this will be one of his first concerts with an American orchestra.
The concert will begin with the symphony, under the direction of Nakahara, performing one of Liszt’s famous Hungarian Rhapsodies.
Then Lakatos and his band will come out and launch into a varied program that will include themes from “Schindler’s List,” a medley from “Fiddler on the Roof” and traditional Hungarian folk tunes.
“With this type of music, the appeal is universal,” says Nakahara.