Hangszín

The Oláh Roma of Hungary are a minority within a minority, having moved to Hungary and other areas of Central Europe from Romania a couple of centuries ago, and still maintaining a cultural identity separate from both Magyars and other Roma groups. Their very name means ‘Foreign’ (and is cognate, as it happens, to ‘Welsh’). The singer Mónika Lakatos was born into this community, which has made a contribution to music out of all proportion to its size, and whose music is enlivened by quirks of instrumentation and performance, including drumming on a metal pot, and an insistent stream of bouncy nonsense syllables churned out by an animateur leavening the somewhat four-square rhythmic matrix.

The songs here tend to bear a strong family resemblance to each other in form and style so it is a pleasant surprise when one breaks the mould, like the unpredictable twists and turns of ‘Szávátoné’. Lakatos' gorgeous, intent voice is the high point here, highly flexible and beautifully controlled, flickering with subtle ornamentation, and well served by the outstanding recording. The music is least successful when attempting upbeat moods, having a slightly hollow air of forced jollity, but the band excel in the slower, emotionally richer songs, as in the stunning ‘Elment a Madárka’.