Lucian Ban, John Surman, Mat Maneri – Cantica Profana
(Sunnyside, 2025)
Lucian Ban, John Surman, Mat Maneri – The Athenaeum Concert
(Sunnyside, 2025)
By Dan SorrellsÂ
The folk music that so inspired Béla Bartók as he traveled Transylvania with
his phonograph one hundred years ago continues to bloom, renewing in cycles,
the flowers and forms of one season becoming the fertile humus that grows
the next generation. In 2020, the trio of pianist Lucian Ban, violist Mat
Maneri, and woodwind maestro John Surman debuted their chamber-folk
improvisations on Transylvanian Folk Songs,a project rooted deeply
in Bartók’s own and an outgrowth of Ban and Maneri’s earlier duo work. After
some pandemic delays, the trio toured on the material between 2022 and 2024.
From those concerts, two new releases on Sunnyside:
Cantica Profana,
a compilation of tracks from several European shows, and
The Athenaeum Concert,
a full set from the prestigious Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest (which would
also turn out to be Surman’s last major performance before his retirement).
Transylvanian Folk Songs originally featured nine tracks inspired
by transcriptions and wax cylinder recordings Bartók made of traditional
peasant tunes from the Carpathians. This is music that also imbued Ban’s
childhood in Cluj. Like the nine sons in Bartók’s “Cantata Profana,” these
songs underwent a profound metamorphosis at the hands of the trio, budding
melodies and motifs charged with an improvised magic that transformed them
into something wilder and less familiar. Cantica Profana and
The Athenaeum Concert
further push this evolution, with the opportunity to hear multiple versions
of songs showing how the trio continually reshapes and renews its source
material.
The more upbeat pieces—”Violin Song,” “Dowry Song,” “Transylvanian
Dance”—are driven by rhythmic motives, often delivered by Ban but liable to
be traded around to any member as the moment demands. This rhythm helps
structure the improvisations and allows the trio to range farther from the
folk aspects of the primary melodies. These are the tracks, such as the long
Athenaeum take of “Dowry Song,” that can verge closest to jazz—only in brief
flashes—flirting momentarily with a bluesy chord progression or syncopated
figure, able to snap back at the call of the motif. But while these
musicians with deep jazz credentials are creating music that isn’t overtly
jazzy, they bring some of its newer tools to bear on an older realm of music
that was rooted in improvisation. “Carol” from
Transylvanian Folk Songs
develops a beautiful, rippling quality like light on water; it resurfaces in
a knottier form on Cantica Profana as “Dark Woods,” night music
possessing the character of its new name. Ban’s elegiac but resolute piano
from “Bitter Love Song” becomes muted and percussive in its reimagining as
“Evening in the Village,” where Suman’s bass clarinet and Maneri’s viola are
a rich embroidery of sound, stitched in braided patterns. Some songs touch
only lightly upon their founding melodies, inaugural seeds that warmly house
the essence and energy for the trio’s new growth.
The music across these albums is held in a series of tensions: it contains
that kernel of its originary material, but at the same time can feel distant
from the vocal tradition that inspired it. It doesn’t sound like something
that would be sung in the village square, but it can also sound radical in
the context of the concert halls and churches it was performed in. Too
well-dressed to be free improvisation, too tousled for classical music.
Maneri and Surman both work around the harmonic edges, straying into
microtonal realms that are a natural component of many folk musics but can
give an alien sheen to chamber music. Ban is a pianist of beautiful clarity,
but he can also be slyly non-linear, even his comping at times subverting
tidy resolution, like his staccato pressure building in “Violin Song II.”
There’s a risk, as this music resounds within the frescoed dome of the
Athenaeum, that it becomes divorced from that provincial spirit that
originally shaped it. This concerned Bartók, too. Alex Ross noted that he
“acknowledged the gap between what urban listeners considered folkish […]
and what peasants were actually singing and playing.” Ban quotes Bartók
directly in the liner notes, where he claims that the “harsh characters” of
musical notation “cannot possibly render […] all the pulsing life of
peasant-music.” But Cantica Profanaand
The Athenaeum Concert
are not ethnographic or nostalgic exercises; the goal is not imitation or
resurrection. The trio stand near a familiar old starting point and set off
a different way, where the path isn’t so well-defined—or is waiting to be
cut. There’s often something haunting in the result, perhaps conjured in the
resonance of these concert spaces, where the trio becomes a medium for
something quite ghostly, tuned into an ancient and fragmented signal, orphic
melodies fleetingly brought into focus, glimpses through the thickets.
As these ethereal melodies surface in the developing improvisations—just
listen to the yearning when the theme finally emerges in “First Return” and
“Last Return”—I find myself marveling: how does this music,
abstracted so many steps from its source, so strongly retain its vital
character? The trio never neglects its emotional core. Improvisation becomes
the engine of that timeless emotive content. That pulsing life. It’s a most
difficult thing: to catch hold of those deep-rooted musical qualities that
feel universal and then make them sound like something we haven’t heard
before.