Drawing from their NPR Album Of the Year Transylvanian Folk Songs featuring legendary reeds-man John Surman and their new ECM duo release Transylvanian Dance pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri will reimagine through improvisation the Béla Bartók Field Recordings of folk songs from Transylvania using the unique acoustic possibilities of the National Sawdust space to bring back to life century old songs using live performance, audio from the original Edison wax cylinder recordings, rare handwritten manuscripts and photographs taken by Bartók himself in his field trips.

Lucian Ban, piano

Mat Maneri, viola

The 20th century Hungarian composer Béla Bartok loved the folk music of Transylvania in western Romania. He famously experienced an epiphany in 1904 when he heard an 18-year-old woman singing songs from her Transylvanian village and was soon on the road in search of more music. Between 1909 – 1917 he transcribed thousands of melodies, recording hundreds of folk musicians on wax cylinders and would call the completion of his research into Transylvanian folk music, as “my life’s goal”. The profound knowledge and beauty of these ancient folk songs will also change forever his compositional vision.

A century later, two outstanding improvisers – violist Mat Maneri and pianist Lucian Ban – draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartók’s imagination, looking again at carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more through their unique duo sound and improvisatory concept.