For their second ECM album as a duo, Romanian pianist Lucian Ban and American violist Mat Maneri find a new source of inspiration by following in the footsteps of Béla Bartók, who, at the beginning of the 20th century, set out to collect and transcribe numerous pieces of folk tradition from Transylvania. Taking up this folk music that had so stimulated the imagination of the great Hungarian composer at the time, the two musicians turn these songs into both "springboards and sources of melodic material" for arrangements "capturing the spirit of the original pieces while offering improvisers the opportunity to infuse them with their own universes. The deeper we dive into this ancestral material, the more new perspectives open up. These folk songs definitely have a lot to teach us." Recorded live in October 2022 in Timișoara as part of the "Retracing Bartók" project, these performances brilliantly testify to the exceptional degree of understanding and complicity achieved by Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri over their long years of collaboration.
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