Long time collaborators pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri alongside
legendary woodwind master John Surman further explore the folk
music of Transylvania collected by Béla Bartók more than a hundred years
ago. For the past five years the trio has deepened the spirit of their music
while touring, as can be heard on their new recordings, Cantica Profana (CD)
and The Athenaeum Concert (vinyl LP only).
From Ban and Maneri’s informative liner notes: “Once we took the music on
the road an unfolding of a new musical spirit was happening to us with
each concert. Revisiting the dances, carols, dowry songs, doinas and lamentations
first recorded in Timisoara in 2018 with each live performance new
vistas would open, new forms would spring, themes and instrumental roles
would be freely interchanged, a ‘pulsing life of peasant-music,’ to use
Bartok’s own words, carrying us forward.
Each musician brings a unique sound and approach to the music, from
Maneri’s singular microtonal viola tones and esoteric musical influences
to Ban’s jazz leanings and archaic Romanian romanticism to Surman’s contemporary
cool and Cornish shine.
The material presented on Cantica Profana and The Athenaeum Concert
stem from the pieces the trio recorded on their initial recording, Transylvanian
Folk Songs (Sunnyside, 2020), yet the live reinterpretations of the
pieces are so radical that a new songbook was born underlining the extraordinary
power contained in these historical gems and the profound originality
of an ensemble working night after night in unbound creativity.