Review: Tcha Limberger’s Gypsy Orchestra****

Tcha Limberger is dwarfed by the musicians in his orchestra as they lead the blind violinist on stage. Swarthy, slender, flop-haired and fine-moustached, Limberger cuts a fragile, romantic figure, while his Budapest Gypsy Orchestra are, to a man, sturdily built and as purposeful as workmen. But when he begins to play, his presence fills the room. Limberger grew up playing the manouche-style gipsy-jazz of Django Reinhardt, but found himself attracted to the music of the Hungarian gipsies and in particular, to a style called Magyar Nota, which he studied with master musicians. The band consists of double bass, cello, viola, second violin, clarinet and cimbalon, the giant, duclimer-like instrument whose metallic notes give this music much of its other-worldly effect, which can be heard on the band’s 2009 album Bura Termett Ido. Intense rather than wild, formally complex but emotionally stirring, classically-rooted and yet threaded through with folkloric technique, it has all the attack and flair associated with gipsy improvisation, played with the control of classically-trained musicians.

Richly textured and shifting between slow, melancholic laments and inspired flights of dexterity, there are moments when the musicians seem almost possessed. Sometimes Limberger sings, in a plaintive, pleasingly harsh tenor that suits the yearning music.

At the heart of everything is Limberger’s glorious ecstatic solo violin, played with a stunning virtuosity that makes him seem purely the channel for the music.