Eclectic Hungarian Diva Returns to Muzsikas Roots

Hungarian diva Marta Sebestyen has been compared to everyone from Jane Siberry and Sandy Denny to the McGarrigle Sisters and the women singers of Bulgaria. But even that far-reaching net of styles doesn’t capture the essence of an artist who is one of the world’s premiere vocal performers, regardless of what she is singing.

Sebestyen has recorded with Deep Forest, Peter Gabriel and the British group Towering Inferno, and her current album, “Kismet,” finds her singing Irish and Indian, as well as Hungarian music. Friday night at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, however, Sebestyen returned to the more familiar setting of Muzsikas, the Hungarian traditional music group she has sung with for nearly two decades.

Even here, however, performing village tunes and czardas dances, Sebestyen’s remarkably rich-timbre voice was the undeniable focus of the music, cutting through the four-piece ensemble with the clarity of a laser piercing the night sky. Impressive as a member of the group, she was even better in her solo passages. In one especially touching number, she sang a cappella, occasionally pausing to play brief, supportive phrases on a wooden flute. Her capacity to move from dark, throaty tones to high, nasal vibrato was remarkable, bringing passion and drama to the music despite the unfamiliarity of the Hungarian words.

Muzsikas is a good-time Hungarian dance ensemble, dedicated to the performance of traditional Hungarian and czardas music in the now-popular tanchaz, or dance houses, of Budapest. On Friday night, their playing, driven by the strong, thumping bass of Daniel Hamar, was irresistibly rhythmic, and one suspects that, had it been possible, the overflow crowd in McCabe’s small concert room would soon have been dancing in the aisles.