SARANAC LAKE — Historic Saranac Lake announced an upcoming concert by internationally acclaimed musicians, Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri. The concert, titled “Transylvanian Dance,” will be held at the Left Bank Cafe on Monday, Sept. 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. The concert honors Saranac Lake’s connection to the great composer, Béla Bartók, who came to the village for his health in the 1940s. Tickets are $75 per person, which includes wine and light hors d’oeuvres.

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók loved the folk music of Transylvania in western Romania. He experienced an epiphany in 1904 when he heard an 18-year-old woman singing songs from her Transylvanian village. He was soon on the road in search of more music. Between 1909 and 1917, he transcribed thousands of melodies and recorded countless hours of folk music on wax cylinders. Bartk would call the completion of his research into Transylvanian folk music his “life’s goal”. The profound knowledge and beauty of these ancient folk songs would forever change his compositional vision.

A century later, two outstanding improvisers — violist Mat Maneri and pianist Lucian Ban — draw fresh inspiration from the music that fired Bartok’s imagination, looking again at carols, lamentations, love songs, dowry songs and more through their unique duo sound and improvisatory concept.

For the concert, Ban and Maneri draw from their acclaimed 2024 ECM Records duo release, Transylvanian Dance, as well as from the NPR Album Of The Year, Transylvanian Folk Songs (Sunnyside 2020) featuring legendary British reedsman John Surman.

Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri will re-imagine live through improvisation the Bela Bartok Field Recordings of early 20th-century folk songs from Transylvania, bringing back to life century-old songs using video projections, audio from the original Edison wax cylinder recordings, rare handwritten manuscripts and photographs taken by Bartok himself in his field trips.

Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have been presenting Transylvanian Dance with concerts on both sides of the Atlantic. They are particularly excited to bring the performance to Saranac Lake, where Bartk composed some of his greatest work in the last summers of his life. In 2019, Lucian Ban visited the Bartk Cabin in Saranac Lake. Historic Saranac Lake preserves the cabin and shows it to the public by appointment.

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About the Musicians

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Mat Maneri

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Over the course of a 35-year career, Maneri has defined the voice of the viola and violin in jazz and improvised music. Born in Brooklyn in 1969, Maneri has established an international reputation as one of the most original and compelling artists of his generation, praised for his high degree of individualism, a distinctive marriage of jazz and microtonal music and his work with 20th-century icons of improvised music. He has worked with masters such as Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Paul Motian and William Parker and with influential bandleaders like Vijay Iyer, Matthew Shipp, Marilyn Crispell, Joelle Leandre, Kris Davis, Tim Berne and Craig Taborn, etc, reflecting a growing consensus of Maneri as a central figure in American creative music.

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Lucian Ban

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Called “A name to watch” by The Guardian and “one of the most gifted pianists to move to New York” (B. Gallanter, DMG), Lucian Ban is a Romanian born, NYC based pianist & composer known for his amalgamations of Transylvanian folk with improvisation, for his mining of 20th Century European classical music with jazz and for his pursue of a modern chamber jazz ideal. His music has been described as a “triumph of emotional and musical communication” (All About Jazz), “Unorthodox but mesmeringly beautiful” (The Guardian) and as holding an “alluring timelessness and strong life-force” (Downbeat). He has recorded 24 albums under his name for Sunnyside, CIMP and ECM featuring some of most important musicians in jazz & improvised music and maintains a busy touring schedule.