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This article is completely non-neutral favoring towards its subject. Unsourced phrases like "not only a scorching virtuoso, but a musician of extraordinary stylistic versatility" and "the kind of universal musician so rarely encountered in our time" clearly do not belong in an encyclopedia. J04n(talk page) 00:23, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It contains a number of discrepancies. Firstly, Les Ateliers du Grand Ile never existed - and I live and lived in Brussels at the time, working just off the Sablon. It confutes the Ateliers d'Atalaide, a bohemian restaurant on the Chaussée de Charleroi, and the Grand'Ile/Ilôt Sacré neighbourhood around the Grand'Place, which is one tourist-trap restaurant after the other. More commonly, his band would play at the Grand Mayeur on the Sablon in Brussels, a hybrid Franco-Russian place about a hundred meters from the Royal Conservatoire.
However, that being said I remember Yehudi Menuhin's own explanation of his discovery of Lakatos, broadcast on RTBF Radio 3 about a week later. He had been performing in the Beaux Arts concert hall, and after the concert went to find some supper on the Sablon as it was much better eating than in the Ilôt Sacré. Passing outside the Mayeur, he heard a violin style he could understand - authentic Hungarian gypsy, but with overtones and undertones. He stopped on the pavement and listened, and when the band took a break, went in and cornered the leader, Lakatos: he was the violinist and his name was that of Liszt's teacher. Without explaining it, Menuhin asked him about his parentage and discovered unbroken patrilineal descent. So digging in his bag, he found a piece of Liszt's and asked Lakatos if he read enough music to be able to play it: he could, he did, and it blew Menuhin away because it was phrased with pointing very different from classical tradition. His emphasis showed what had long been suspected, that Liszt - for all his virtuosity - had bowdlerised his sources for market accessibility, and this had been further muddied by mediocre performers, in much the same way Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser did the Hebridean tradition to fit in with Mendelsohn amd Beethoven's imitations, and Bunting did to the Irish tradition which would otherwise have been inaccessible to classically-trained musicians, using non-standard tuning and every form of modal scordatura and inharmonic passing-note imaginable, of which modern gracing is but a distant memory. What it also means is that an entire new school of interpretation is opening for Liszt - and presumably Czerny and possibly some Beethoven and Haydn too, given Liszt's father and grandfather's employment on the Esterhazy estate as well as his own training.
I am not posting this as it is undocumentable memory and effectively OR as a first-person testimony. You might be able to get a copy of the RTBF recording, as that kind of thing is never destroyed. Otherwise, let this stand as an individual testimony which if corroborated might form the foundation for a neutral rewriting of the page. I would certainly argue against its deletion as an individual boast because of the Menuhin testimony - we're talking about someone the Japanese would recognise as a Living Saint in his mastery of his particular skill, and that gives him the right to be a bit full of himself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.129.84.66 (talk) 22:18, 7 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The info in this article is basically true and Lakatos is surely a very appreciated violinist, but it is also true that the tone of the article is not appropriate for WP (not to mention that it is a copy/paste). If somebody has the time to rewrite the article it would be great, I personally have very little time for WP and prefer to use it to bring new info rather than rearrange old info to fit WP lines. Kenshin (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, given this hasn't happened and the meme has problems, I'm doing it anyway. I'm the 109.129.84.66 poster now in a different country. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.10.235.165 (talk) 00:27, 26 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
