8th annual "An Irreverent Xmas with Charlie J"

Captain Phil fillin' in

Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri
Transylvanian Dance

Mat Maneri: viola; Lucian Ban: piano

Transylvanian Dance takes as its starting point transcriptions of folk songs and dance tunes collected by Béla Bartók a century ago. For Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri, these pieces have become “springboards and sources of melodic material” for performances “that capture the spirit of the original yet allow us to improvise and bring our own world to them…” Ban explains: “In our process we don’t have any preconceived notions of how we should arrange these songs. Some take a very improvisational approach. Some are more defined compositionally and harmonically. And others combine the folk material with original motives of ours. If you go deeper into the source material, new vistas are opening.”

Recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing Bartók project in Timi?oara, the album also bears testimony to the finely attuned understanding that Ban and Maneri have achieved in their long-running musical partnership.