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.