Take an audience that is hot for Hungarian gypsy music, submerge it in Schoenberg’s half-nostalgic, half-bitter orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet, towel it down briskly with the rough brilliance of Kodály’s Háry János Suite and heat the stage with amber light.
The London Symphony Orchestra is usually the headline act at the Barbican. Here, under Kristjan Järvi’s hip-swivelling direction, it was the warm-up and backing band for Roby Lakatos and his Ensemble in music as blatant in its mission to excite, amuse and seduce as a gigolo with a rose clamped between his teeth and a year’s supply of one-liners.
The laugh-out-loud sparkle of spiccato and pizzicato, the exquisite ache of minor thirds and augmented fourths and the bedroom-eyes rubato of Fox Dance, Deux Guitares, Le Grand Blond and Hjere Kati only hint at the subtleties of expression in this tradition and its native and borrowed styles.
However, Lakatos smiles while playing passages that would make most violinists cry, accompanied by guitar, piano, bass, second violin and cimbalom, all bite and snap and zing and bottomless pools of coppery, shivery chords. They had me at hello then lost me again with John Williams’s theme from Schindler’s List, played as a love song not a lament.
Järvi and the LSO had already touched on the scourging of mitteleuropa in the Schoenberg, a work that memorialises and critiques the Viennese salon tradition, deeply ambivalent in its treatment of Brahms’s gypsy music. In the Kodály the LSO brass dazzled, Huw Morgan’s trumpet sounding heaven-sent.
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Good as they looked, not all of Järvi’s dance moves translated into crisp ensemble. An encore of Monti’s Czárdás had Roman Simovic, the LSO’s concert-master, duel with Lakatos and the hall explode with applause.