Named one of the Best Albums of 2024 by El País, All About Jazz, and PostGenre, Transylvanian Dance is an immersive concert experience inspired by Béla Bartók’s legendary field recordings from Transylvania.
Drawing on their acclaimed ECM Records release, Transylvanian Dance, pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri transform the century-old folk songs collected by Bartók into living contemporary music through improvisation, unfolding alongside video projections of rare archival film footage, Bartók’s own photographs, handwritten manuscripts and excerpts from the original Edison wax-cylinder recordings.
More than a concert, Transylvanian Dance invites audiences into Bartók’s remarkable journey across the villages of Transylvania while revealing the timeless emotional power of the music he preserved.
Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri performance and presentation are part of Retracing Bartók – Reimagining the Béla Bartók Field Recordings project supported by The Tulipán Foundation.

Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri

Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri are internationally recognized for their unique musical partnership, combining Transylvanian folk music, jazz improvisation, 20th-century European classical traditions, and contemporary chamber music. They first collaborated in 2009 on Enesco Re-Imagined, a celebrated reimagining of the music of Romanian composer George Enescu that received multiple Best Album of the Year honors and international acclaim. Their partnership has since produced a series of acclaimed recordings—including ECM’s Transylvanian Concert and Transylvanian Dance, Transylvanian Folk Songs, Oedipe Redux, and Cantica Profana—earning worldwide recognition for revealing unexpected connections between folk traditions, jazz, and contemporary creative music. The Guardian praised their music for its “original voice and unorthodox beauty,” while the Financial Times wrote that they “compress folkloric bacchanals, atonal mysteries and the unmistakable cadences of the blues into a singular aesthetic.”

“Romanian folk meets Brooklyn jazz”ll quote here”

— Financial Times

“It’s not quite folk music. It’s not quite Western classical music. It’s not quite jazz. Ultimately, it is human music, and that is what makes it so beautiful”

— PostGenre

“This beautiful album is made up of arrangements of various folk songs collected by Béla Bartók in Transylvania, performed with enormous complicity and respect by the duo, who imprint their personality on old Romanian folklore and bring it into the 21st century without removing its essence. The result is magical.”

— El Pais

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