ATA All Atsr Artists Pty Ltd presents for one night only direct from Hungary Antal Szalai & his Gypsy Band at the Katanning Town Hall. Bookings are available at Katanning Newsagency, Clive St Katanning.

The Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday, 24th July 2007
Glorious night with minstrels of magic
ANTAL SZALAI AND HIS GYPSY BAND

Woodfire Cabaret, July 21
Reviewed by John Shand

Only music can compete with smell for triggering memory. The asinine NSW live music regulations prevent countless restaurants and clubs from readily presenting the music of the homelands of so many Australian residents. At least the Hungarians and Austrians are well served in this regard, with the third visit of violinist Antal Szalai and his 25-year-old Gypsy Band, performing a glorious show called A Night in Budapest and Vienna.

Szalai is everything a gypsy violinist is supposed to be, playing with swooning ardour and gorgeous tone. But the joy is in the total experience: the five players’ phenomenal musicianship, the repertoire, the ensemble texture and the charm of the old-world showbiz formality, right down to the embroidered waistcoats.

Think Gypsy music and you think violin, but it is Jeno Farkas’s might concert cimbalom which hulks in the middle of the stage and is central to defining the music’s texture. A giant hammered dulcimer, it sounds like a harpsichord down low and a harp up high, and Farkas plays it with blinding virtuosity including on the inevitable Dark Eyes.

Clarinettist Laszlo Feher also plays the braying tarogato and pan pipes of his own devising, which featured in an uncannily bird-like duet with Szalai on The Lark. Even Kalman Bakos’s viola is an unusual instrument, a flat bridge allowing him to play the chords underpinning the music with Gyula Gabura’s double bass.

The deep folk roots of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 were emphasised in a performance of stern passion. Whether playing folk songs or classical pieces, the band blended the same good humour, reverence and rapture, with a dynamic range from the softest mewing a music box could make to uproarious fervour.

This is a must-see event, whatever your musical tastes. There is nothing like it in Australia.