Hear the soulful sound of Roma violinist Roby Lakatos

Edinburgh in August is the ultimate gypsy city, full of itinerant artists packed into temporary accommodation experiencing daily approbation from the masses. But while real Gypsy influence is never far from the Fringe, this year it has invaded the civilised confines of the Usher Hall, as the International Festival programme embraces not just the standard classical “Gypsy” repertoire of Brahms and Liszt, but the music – and the persons – of the gypsies themselves.

“This isn’t an all-out statement about gypsy music,” says Jonathan Mills, the festival director. “The idea is to approach borders from a number of perspectives. We’re looking at examples of music connected to nomadic artists that flourished over the centuries. There’s a kind of musical etymology, an archaeology showing patterns of migration and the influences of different traditions on Western music.”

But the average person’s understanding of Gypsy music is as fraught with misconception as our understanding of the gypsies themselves – the word comes from the Middle English “Egyptian”, a name given to anyone looking vaguely foreign who happened to step off a ship into 15th-century England. Ever since, the Roma have been buffeted by public perception, from rampant romanticising to their vilification as hubcap-stealing pariahs. This before you consider the atrocities that they have suffered, from intermittent pogroms to the Holocaust and the current racially motivated violence against the Roma population in Italy.

It is, however, the romantic image that lingers, misleadingly, in the Gypsy musical world. For those audience members who come to gypsy music armed only with boozy memories of a fiddler with flashing eyes playing over a bucket of wilting red roses in their local East European eatery, the question of what Gypsy music actually is may seem rather elusive.

But while the International Festival programme may offer clues – Pushkin’s romantic literary vision in Rachmaninov’s Aleko or the modern-day virtuoso playing of the flamboyant gypsy violinist Roby Lakatos – none is quite what it seems. Aleko flouts romanticised visions of Gypsy values; and Lakatos composes new “gypsy” music on nontraditional instruments heavily influenced by jazz.

“Gypsy music is a performing style, not a compositional one,” says Iván Fischer, the chief conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, whose mixed Edinburgh programme of authentic Gypsy and Gypsy-influenced classical music is aided by the Roma father and son violinists Jósef Lendvay Jr and Sr. “It’s about improvisation, rich ornamentation and excessive rubato. But modern-day Hungarian Gypsies would recognise the music that Brahms used in his Hungarian Dances, because those tunes have been passed down, unchanged, through their families.”

This idea of tradition handed down through generations is very familiar to Lakatos. He is a seventh-generation descendant of the “king of Gypsy violinists”, János Bihari, whose virtuosic playing 180 years ago entranced Western classical composers drunk on the exotic lure of the gypsy virtuosos flooding Western cities. Liszt was captivated by Bihari’s “magic violin”. “This music is a kind of opium, of which I am sometimes in great need.” But was this sound the authentic folk music that Liszt thought it, or a café version for polite society?

“Like all Roma music, from whatever tradition, it took on the music of its host country and adapted it, so what Liszt was hearing was essentially a preserved Hungarian folk music made distinctly Roma,” says the composer Nigel Osborne, of Edinburgh University. “What Gypsy music brought to this folk tradition was a completeness.

“What Liszt was listening to, I believe, was a harmonic tradition that had been developed in the 18th century, taken on and developed by Roma from music such as Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, which the composer had himself extrapolated from Spanish gypsy flamenco music.”

If gypsy composers themselves have missed out on the credit in this stylistic osmosis, Osborne doesn’t think history should judge the Brahmses and Liszts too harshly. “What they did, in turning these tunes into Hungarian Rhapsodies and Dances, wasn’t a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of Gypsy music, it was a dignified exercise. There was enough common musical language to make the symbiosis meaningful.”

That particular symbiosis is one that still holds a fascination for a new generation of Hungarian Roma musicians. Fischer points to the Lendvays. “The father plays in a restaurant most of the time and doesn’t read music. The son had classical training and became a wonderful classical concert artist, but he still has the Gypsy tradition in his blood, learnt from childhood. What is fascinating is with them we can really explore this territory where classical music meets Gypsy music.” It’s all, after all, in the way you play it.

Roby Lakatos, Aug 15-17, The Hub. Budapest Festival Orchestra, Aug 23 & 25, 8pm, Usher Hall; soloists from the BFO, Aug 24, 2.30pm, & 26, 11am, Queens Hall. Aleko, Aug 25, 8pm, Usher Hall. (www.eif.co.uk)