And now for something completely different.
And now for something completely different.
We have one Béla Bartók LP, actually a double LP, a European import, that we bought at the downtown library for a song when they thinned their collection. Bartók (1881–1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, photographer and pioneering ethnomusicologist—a man of science. In 1904 he heard an 18-year-old woman singing songs from her Transylvanian village, and his life’s goal was established. Bartók traveled to remote villages across Eastern Europe with an Edison phonograph and wax cylinders to record over 13,000 regional folk melodies. The folk songs greatly influenced his own work.
Pianist Lucian Ban left Transylvania at 30. He and the violist Mat Maneri performed “Transylvanian Dance,” improvisations on the songs Bartók collected, at the Bop Shop on Wednesday night. We found the performance as emotional and deeply human as Bartók’s recordings. Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have recorded a few versions of Retracing Bartók—Reimagining the Béla Bartók Field Recordings for ECM Records, and this was the last stop on their recent tour.
Leave a comment