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Written in fRoots issue 295/296, 2008
 

DVD

CYMBALOM LEGACY – The Soundscape of Miklós Lukács
Amaní Productions / Steve Weiss Music (2007)

This film, shown at London’s Ritzy cinema as part of this year’s Gypsy Film Festival curated by Garth Cartwright, would be a perfect fit in BBC4’s intelligent and interesting European Roots series. Researched, written, and beautifully filmed and directed by Amsterdam-resident Mexican director Mano Camón, it centres on Hungarian Roma cimbalom virtuoso Miklós Lukács but also manages, in a very natural and watchable way, to cram into its 45 minutes a wealth of wider information about the instrument.
      The pre-title sequence sets the tone: a moodily lit close-up sequence with Lukács preparing to play, tying cotton-wool onto his beater-sticks and then launching into a dazzling piece, shot from above rather than the usual unrevealing audience view. It leads into a short, clear history of the instrument he plays - the big, finely engineered pedal-damped cimbalom, developed in Hungary in the late 19th century - illustrated with a well-researched set of old stills and archive movie footage.
      Further into the film’s well-edited flow are extracts of performances, including Roma band Técsöi Banda, a Romanian Roma street cimbalist playing in Budapest, Lukács playing in Mitsoura’s band, illustrative concert footage of other cimbalists, a visit to the Budapest workshop of Ákos Nagy, who is now the only maker of pedal cimbaloms, all intercut with interview footage with Lukács, who is a thoughtful and knowledgeable speaker.
      He talks about his development as a player, and his influences, which include jazz and particularly Oscar Peterson, and in the course of the film he plays a handful of solo pieces (which can be picked out of the DVD menu to play separately) and in clips with his own quintet and singer Beáta Palya. Son of a cimbalist, he entered his first competition at the age of nine, and 1986 black and white footage shows the tiny besuited player delighting a concert hall with extraordinary confidence and skill. Carrying the skills and his ideas onward in the present day, we see him teaching a promising young cimbalist one-to-one at Budapest’s Talentum music and dance secondary school, which has classes in the playing of traditional and Roma music.
      Made almost single-handedly by director Camón (with, incidentally, impeccably recorded sound that celebrates the instrument’s rich resonances), this is an elegant piece of work, and as far as I know it’s the only documentary there is about one of the world’s most capable and complete instruments.
      www.amaniproductions.eu. The DVD is available, for the price of a CD, from US online shop www.steveweissmusic.com


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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