This is a story of the creative use of ‘folk music’, in multiple refractions and thus in multiply charged tension: in the melancholic awareness of the distance from the origin and in the self-confident assertion of those who dare to look back or give the original a presence in an act of incantation. […] Ban and Maneri make this folk music shine anew and Béla Bartók is, in a sense, the third-party present.” And last but not least, themselves: they do not reconstruct the ravishing finds ‘true to the original’, they take improvisatory liberties and allusions, and this is the jazz aspect of the enterprise. […] There are pieces on this album that are close to the original, and those that deal more freely, sometimes even ‘abstractly’ with the original. This, too, is in the spirit of Bartók. He was not looking for ‘folkloristic’ fragments for his music; he was looking for a new musical spirit rooted in the elemental. It blows in this whole Transylvanian songbook.
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