Lucian Ban; Mat Maneri - BEla BartUk; Lucian Ban; Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Dance

On their second ECM duo album Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and US violist Mat Maneri find fresh inspiration as they follow the trail of BEla BartUk, revisiting the folk music that spurred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer who, in the early 20th century, collected and transcribed numerous pieces from Transylvania. For the duo these songs have become ispringboards and sources of melodic materiali for arrangements ithat capture the spirit of the original yet allow us to improvise and bring our own world to them. If you go deeper into the source material, new vistas open up. These folk songs teach us many things.i Recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing BartUk project in Timisoara, these performances also bear testimony to the finely attuned understanding that Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have achieved in their long-running musical partnership.