REVIEW: Budapest Café Orchestra at the Huntingdon Hall, Worcester (Friday, August 21, 2015).

EAST meets west… calling at Haringay along the way.

Of course, this vital snippet of information might just have been a punning piece of whimsy, courtesy of the band’s breathtakingly impressive virtuoso violinist.

But whether he was referring to the London borough or making a tongue-in-cheek reference to ‘Hungary’ didn’t really matter. For this was a night of musical fireworks and any humorous interludes merely the icing on a very rich cultural cake.

The Budapest Café Orchestra comprises players at the top of their game, one of whom is a world champion accordionist. Then there’s the aforesaid fiddler, jazz violin superstar Christian Garrick, who makes his instrument talk, plus a guitarist who clearly doffs his natty trilby in the direction of gypsy jazz maestro Django Reinhardt.

And completing the line-up is a bass player who enjoyed a former incarnation with 1960s soul outfit Jimmy James and the Vagabonds.

You just never know what or who will be washed up next on the music world’s tideline… And so the scene was set for a non-stop pot pourri of polka pyrotechnics, expeditions into far-flung Gaelic galaxies and even beyond.

There were doleful Yiddish melodies, a Cossack’s lament for his homeland, Scottish airs and even what appeared to be a good old blues work-out, before the delivery of the entirely expected Russian dance tune which briefly hit a hundred miles an hour before apparently hitting a traffic jam on the outskirts of Petrograd.

Even a broken string didn’t faze Mr Garrick, who fitted a replacement while chatting away to the audience at the same time. Yes indeed, this was truly a case of multi-tasking, seeming to symbolise the prowess of a band that can take any tune and immediately turn it into a symphony.

John Phillpott