The Budapest Café Orchestra are neither from Budapest, nor an orchestra nor attached to any kind of café. What they are, however, is something else, and when I say something else I mean they really are something else.
These guys held the sell-out crowd sweltering under Prestfelde’s hot tin roof in the palm of their cool, ministering hands. They swirled up the temperatures even higher with a combination of electric musicality, and heft and twang. They’re real heat artists, conjuring the mercury ever higher with the kind of on-stage pyrotechnics, musically speaking, that should come with a health warning in a ring-bound folder of sensible colour and a whole inch thick. It really was something else. Crazy and barely contained.
This was the Hot Club in a time of apocalyptic meltdown. A two-hour detour from our collective coach trip towards the fires of Armageddon into the Elysian fields of devil-may-care. O, what bliss it was to be alive in their company! Gipsy jazz that sucked gyrations up from across the whole teetering world, not only from Hungary, but from Romania, Ukraine, Tarentino-land, Georgia, the Balkans, the Shetland isles and the kofta-spiced night streets of Harringey. This was the kind of something else that only live music delivers, which jangled and sang out from the unassuming scruff of the quartet’s East European suits, Fedoras askew, hatbands moistening with their own soaring caloricity and genius.
Friday was not the first time the Shropshire Music Trust had lured them Severnside, but for me it was a dizzying entrée, a first glimpse into their technicolours of musical possibility. What band leader Christian Garrick can do with a violin is not the question. It’s what he can’t do you should be asking. And on this showing you’d come up with a gaping nada to that kind of impertinence. His instrument became a device of Protean invention, a blur of virtuosic wizardry, a box of delights from which he yanked sense and sound, at times with a single bowstring, with deliciously comic timing. Wistfulness too as breezes of Gaelic and sea percolated around the grateful audience in the slow heartbeat of ‘The Maids of the Shieling’. In their jags of musicological plunder no nook, it seems, has been left un-ransacked: Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto bundled into a 3-minute ‘Squeezebox Concerto’ the perfect example of the point at which ridiculousness met the sublime. Steamy hats off to Marcus Tilt as soloist here, and to multifarious fingers of Adrian Zolotuhin on guitar, saz and domra all underpinned by the immaculate bass of Kelly Cantlon. Partners in crime against misery, all four complicit, neck-deep in their rebellion against expectation and the mirthlessness of modern times. These four blazing waymarks in concert beguiled us off beaten tracks into the mysteries of worlds elsewhere.
They were the perfect role models then for the young members of the Shropshire World Folk Music Ensemble, who opened the billing with aplomb. This next generation of musicians were treated to a masterclass in the irreverent banditry of live performance. We all were.
