Festival runs to 4 April ( ). “I love fairy tales. Lakatos challenged Vengerov to play with his quintet, then got it to back Lockwood with Hot Club rhythms and a rousing emulation of Django Reinhardt by the previously self-effacing guitarist. He’s a genuine original, fusing his technique with gypsy swing of the Grappelli sort into a seamless improvising style. With his northern French origins, embodied in the seascape evocations of his electric violin concerto Les Mouettes, he also stood for the festival’s roots.Fortunately, a string of improbable encores made amends, as the stars came together. Even the Brahms Hungarian Dance was bound to seem mild by comparison, and Vengerov dispatched it neatly, putting his most concentrated work into the rarefied lines of the “M?tation” by Massenet.It was unfair to make Lockwood the warm-up act.

At the centre, Lakatos’s set with quintet and an increasingly redundant orchestra totally upstaged Vengerov. This was a display of virtuoso skill and sensitivity rounded out with fine lyrical swooping and quick-fire double-handed pizzicato. Not gypsy music as we know it now, this was the kind of well-bred but dazzling playing that excited 19th-century listeners, Brahms among them, and still gets audiences on their feet.Wisely, Vengerov didn’t try to “follow that”. But why hold up the real action?Once that arrived, it blew away the fusty atmosphere. Marin Alsop conducted energetic, direct Dvorak and Rimsky-Korsakov, and the latter nicely gave the LSO’s guest leader, Boris Garlitsky, a chance to shine as the evening’s unannounced first soloist. The three big names are all classically trained, and the show presented them in a shamelessly hierarchical ascent, from Lockwood’s crossover through Lakatos’s concert-hall Hungarian band, to climax with the virtuosity of Vengerov, padded out in a curiously old-fashioned way with popular orchestral pieces.

As both towns lost their ferry traffic, the locations became marginal, and while the Boulogne connection remains, the British end has moved to the capital. Here, the bright idea occurred of attaching an eye-catching festival that would celebrate all facets of the violin, from the craft of making it to the global proliferation of traditional and classical styles.
Gypsy roots were the idea behind this splashy opening night On paper, it looked tentative. The Genius of the Violin festival has grown out of the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition, an event founded as a cross-Channel venture to link Folkestone and Boulogne. Putting three wildly contrasting star violinists – Roby Lakatos, Maxim Vengerov, Didier Lockwood – on stage together made a spectacular reinvention of an ageing event.

They play the 100 Club, Oxford Street London W1, tonight and Thursday, and then Newcastle, Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton and Leeds ( ). It’s a labour of love, the Rutles thing, and if we can just go out and play the songs it’ll be fine.” And if it isn’t, there’s always Les Gar?s de la Plage to fall back on.Neil Innes and the Rutles play the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 on Wednesday. My friend, John Dowie, says to me: ‘If you don’t rehearse, what can possibly go wrong?’”And are there any more “undiscovered” Rutles songs still out there? “If it made me money to do some new Rutles songs, I’d be up the drainpipe like a rat!” Really? “No. The Teenage Cancer Trust is building proper units for them across the country.” He’s less clued-up on what the Rutles set-list will be “I’ve no idea There’s 30-odd songs to choose from It’s wonderfully vague.