Preview: Genius Of The Violin, Barbican, London
'Even when I play Bach I improvise'
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Your support makes all the difference.Roby Lakatos's appearance at the end of last summer's Proms fiddle extravaganza was tantalising, leaving us - after the other performers' menu of Bach, Vivaldi, and Scottish reels - with birdsong in our ears. He'll be tantalising listeners again at the Barbican, when he takes his place among traditional virtuosi including Mark O'Connor and Nikolaj Znaider, for an evening of variegated light-classical delights. Lakatos will be revealing his own unique take on the music of Sarasate.
How would Lakatos himself describe what he does? "Fundamentally, it's Gypsy music. I'm not a classical musician, in that everything I do is improvised. I do play Bach, but he comes out differently every night."
Lakatos did train briefly as a classical violinist when he was 15, at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, but that came as a shock. "It hurt - in my back, my fingers, arms, everywhere. But once I got my playing position sorted out, everything went fine." The shock was because this descendant of Janos Bihari - the man whom Beethoven had crowned "King of the Gypsy Violinists" - was a self-taught player in a very different tradition.
"I was given my first instrument at the age of three - a tiny 16th-size fiddle - and I found the notes on it myself," he says. "My father was usually away on tour, so I just absorbed everything I could from our record collection." He also absorbed the jazz his elder brother played. "The sounds coming out of his room - Stan Getz, Charlie Parker - got into my bloodstream, and remain there still."
When he was six, he played the key solo in a Gypsy violinists' gala concert in Budapest. "The event was in memory of a Gypsy composer whose instrument was normally in a museum, but they brought it out that evening for me to play."
A whizz violinist then, a whizz violinist today: Lakatos's intonation remains rock-steady, no matter how vertiginously high or fast he plays.
Tonight. The Genius of the Violin series continues to 3 March (020-7638 4141; www.barbican.org.uk)
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