Ban, Lucian / John Surman / Matt Maneri - Transylvanian Folk Songs : The Bela Bartók Field Recordings
SKU
28-SYS1580.2
Lucian Ban - piano
John Surman - baritone & soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Mat Maneri - viola
This is everything you would want from an exploration of folk music melodies of Romania from these three distinctive players. Surman particularly sounds amazing here - like he was born to play this music!.
“Their mutual interest in the work of Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók led to their new recording, Transylvanian Folk Songs, an assortment of arrangements of folk songs collected by Bartók in Ban’s native Romania.
In the early 1900s Bartók was introduced to the folk music of the Romanian people in Transylvania. His immediate infatuation with the music led him to a lifelong pursuit to record and catalog these beautiful regional pieces. Bartók spent eight years traveling the Romanian countryside recording and transcribing these pieces, which he would spend the rest of his life collating into six catalogs containing over three thousand tunes, simply entitled Romanian Folk Music. The composer’s own compositions would be influenced at every level by his folk studies.
A century later, these three outstanding improvisers – Mat Maneri, Lucian Ban and John Surman – draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartók’s imagination, looking again at the carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more which the composer collected, in the period between 1909-1917.
The trio left the transcriptions loose to allow them to take liberties in translation. The arrangements are incredibly diverse and intriguing to hear, as the three musicians allow themselves ample space to find themselves in the pieces. The trio fell into the music immediately and absorbed the legacy of the music as they performed it in front of a receptive, native crowd, as can be heard on their recording from a live performance at the Baroque Hall of the Timișoara Museum of Art in Timișoara.”
- LabelSunnyside
- UPC016728158022
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