Lucian Ban & John Herbert

Enesco Re-Imagined

Lucian Ban - piano
Mat Maneri - viola
Raliph Alessi - trumpet & flugelhorn
Albrecht Maurer - violin
Tony Malaby - saxophones
Badal Roy - tablas
John Herbert - double bass
Gerald Clever - drums

Syunnyside Records 2010

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Sunnyside Communications

348 west 38th street, suite 12B

New York, NY, 10018

Tel.: +1 212 564 4606

email: privacy@sunnysiderecords.com

www.sunnysiderecords.com

CD - DETAILS

recored live at George Enesco International Festival 2009 in Bucharest, Romania, september 20th 2009 by Lucian Balas, Paradigma Productions, mastered by Max Ross at systems 2 Studios, Brooklyn Non.2009

Sunnyside Records Enesco Re-Imagined

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George Enescu (georges enesco) 1881–1955

Born in 1881, in Liveni, a small village in the northeast of Romania, Enesco was a child prodigy, who began studying piano at 4, took violin lessons with a gypsy to¬ddler at around the same age and started composing music already at 5. Menuhin recalls being with Enesco in the mid-1920s and witnessing Ravel burst through the door with the singular reason of having his Romanian friend play through his freshly composed Violin Sonata.

His first visit to America was in 1923 as violinist, composer, and conductor (he conducted one of his symphonies) with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also played in San Francisco to the delight of seven-year-old Yehudi Menuhin and three years later the ten-year-old went to Paris to study with him.

During the 1920s Enesco directed the Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston and

Cincinnati Orchestras. In 1936 he was short-listed to replace Arturo Toscanini as the permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic and led the famed orchestra between the years 1937 – 1938. He would return to America almost yearly till 1949.

The cellist Pablo Casals claimed that Enesco was, in the depth and range of his gifts, the “greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart”.The great Leopold Stokowski says about him, “I have known very many great musicians, and very few geniuses. Enesco was a genius “. He is one of the great violin virtuosos of the 20th century, he played piano in a way that made Arthur Rubinstein somewhat envious, played viola and cello as well and possessed a phenomenal memory. He was a conductor of stunning clarity and was a great teacher and lecturer. His generosity and affability were legendary and Yehudi Menuhin describes him as being the “most generous and selfless of hearts”.

But above all George Enesco is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, one whose time has ¬nally arrived. Enesco’s published output extends to only 33 opus numbers, though several of these are very large-scale works (the three symphonies and Opera Oedipe). The demands of a busy career as a performer were not the only reason for this comparative paucity of fi¬nished output. Enesco was also an obsessive perfectionist: many of his published works were repeatedly redrafted before their

¬first performances, and revised several times thereafter. Moreover, as recent research has made increasingly clear, the works which he did allow to be published were merely the tip of a huge submerged mass of manuscript work-in-progress (the bulk of which is held by the Enesco Museum, Bucharest). Traditional accounts of Enesco’s musical development place great emphasis on the elements of Romanian folk music which appear in his works at an early stage lines. Particularly influential here was the doina, a type of meditative song, frequently melancholic, with an extended and flexible line in which melody and ornamentation merge into one. (This was the type of song for which Béla Bartók had coined the phrase parlando rubato.)

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July 12, 2011 | Enesco Re-Imagined CD makes BEST OF 2010 JJA lists
Enesco Re-Imagined CD makes quite a few of "BEST OF 2010" lists, including the ones from Jazz Jouranlists Association . . . and lots of great reviews. Please visit the Press section of Lucian Ban´s homepage to check them out.

Raul d'Gama Rose All About Jazz

The life and music of the prodigiously talented Romanian violinist, composer and conductor, George Enesco has been well-preserved and generously honored—not simply by the cognoscenti, but by the appreciative audiences of Romania's George Enesco Festival, that was set up to propagate the music of the composer beyond its preservation in the museum that bears his name in Bucharest. This ingenious album of some of his best-loved work, by another extremely talented Romanian-born pianist and composer, Lucian Ban, is hardly surprising, then. Recorded at the biennial George Enesco Festival in 2009, and cleverly titled Enesco Re-Imagined, it is a spectacular, dreamy affair, rooted, no doubt, in the celebrated musical reality of the celebrated 19th/20th Century composer.

Enesco was a great violinist and an even greater composer, who was beguiled by the world of music that spread across the globe. In the late '20s, he was known to have taken his most famous pupil, Yehudi Menuhin, to a performance of a Gamelan orchestra from Indonesia that performed in Paris. Around that time, Enesco was also known to have rehearsed some music with Uday Shankar, the musician and dancer-brother of famous Indian sitarist, Ravi Shankar. Enesco also had a great ear for Romanian folk music and its influence can be heard throughout in his music. Set against this backdrop of Enesco's devotion to ethnomusicology, Ban's interpretations of the great Romanian composer's work are brilliant, showing an astute understanding of Enesco's proclivities and also a deep understanding of the composer's work—something shared by bassist John H&#233bert, who also shares in the credits as having arranged Enesco's work for this project.

Enesco's work is well-represented here, from the beautiful scherzo for violin, viola, cello, bass and piano. "Aria in Eb," to the 2nd movement of the composer's unfinished, 4th Symphony. The writing for strings is exquisitely adapted for horns as well, and Ban also shows some ingenuity in his writing for percussion instruments, such as the tabla in the second movement of "Sonata No. 3," and elsewhere in the "Orchestral Suite" and "Symphony No. 4," and the trap drums throughout the album's scored work. The exquisite counterpoint of horns, strings and percussion in "Octet" demonstrates absolutely masterful writing, and shows Ban's sensitivity for Enesco's great ear for the sound palette. A spectacular pianist himself, Ban subdues his own pianism, but elevates his overall musical voice to soar with Enesco's throughout the set. Hébert's playing also displays great melodicism, as he negotiates very difficult parts of the score—typically in the adagio movement of Enesco's "Piano Suite No. 1."

This is a wonderful piece of work, and hats off to Sunnyside for its foresight in seeing the ingenuity from Lucian Ban's perspective. Violinist Albrecht Maurer's work, as well as that of violist Mat Maneri, together with the rest of the ensemble—especially the percussionists-are additional testaments to this fine album.

jazzcorner.com

„... Regarded as one of the few classical geniuses of the past century as a violinist, Enescu’s brilliant work as a composer has been under recognized for decades. He was born in Liveni, Romania in 1881 where he began music studies at age four. Enesco showed promise from an early age studying at the Vienna Conservatoire and later in Paris with Gabriel Faure and Andre Gedalge. By his early twenties, he had made a number of impressive debuts as a violin soloist and composed a number of major works (including his well known Romanian Rhapsodies). Enesco had a long relationship with the United States, visiting yearly from 1923 to 1949. During that span, he conducted a number of major orchestras, performed as a violinist, and taught at a number of American universities (most notably Mannes). By 1930 Enescu was considered one of the most famous musicians of his time, conducting all major orchestras, performing & recording some of the definitive interpretations of Bach violin works (many with Yehudi Menuhin), and collaborating closely with such great musicians of 20th century like Pablo Casals, Jacques Thibaud, David Oistrakh, Edouard Risler and Alfred Cortot. Enescu split his time between Bucharest and Paris but finally left Romania in 1946 to teach in the US (most notably at Harvard, Princeton, and Mannes) after the Communist takeover of the country. He passed away in Paris in 1955.

Romanian born, New York based pianist/composer Lucian Ban was familiar with Enescu’s work from his study in Romania but really fell under his spell upon receiving a commission from the George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest to arrange the composer’s work. Upon rediscovery, Ban was immediately drawn and stunned by the depth of Enescu’s catalogue: “I’ve found that many of Enescu’s works, some of which are lesser known, have a structure and a feeling resembling that of jazz; this was the starting point for wanting to present his music in a new light, together with an ensemble featuring some of the most daring musicians of today.” In 2006, Ban started a workshop in an effort to play and re-interpret the Enescu’s compositions using methods garnered from jazz, classical, and contemporary music. In 2008 after receiving the Festival commission, Ban invited his friend, bassist John Hébert, to collaborate on the project and really dig into Enescu’s work. The intention was to “re-imagine” some of Enescu’s lesser known pieces. To assist in their effort, Ban visited the vaults of the Enescu Museum in Bucharest where he was allowed access to the original scores of Enescu’s work.

Enescu Re-Imagined was recorded live at the 2009 George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest on September 20, 2009. Ban and Hébert put together an amazing ensemble to perform these compositions that span the composer’s entire career. The performers included trumpeter Ralph Alessi, tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby, violist Mat Maneri, violinist Albrecht Maurer, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and tabla player Badal Roy. “Aria et Scherzino” is a melodic masterpiece that features a unique ascending open string violin along with a tremendous tenor sax solo from Malaby. “Octet for Strings Opus 7” is one of Enescu’s earliest works (he was all of 19 when it was written). Its modal theme presented an intensity that Badal Roy’s tabla fits under perfectly. Enescu was well known for his use of Romanian folk themes. This device is best represented by the “Sonata No. 3 for Violin & Piano Opus 25.” The first two movements are represented here and illustrate the influence of Romanian gypsy fiddle virtuosos on Enescu. Rounding out the CD is “Symphony No. 4 (Unfinished).” Enescu began work on the piece in 1928 but never finished it. “Especially in Marziale, the 2nd movement we ‘attacked’ the themes and lines which seemed…almost lifted from the best of Ellington or Mingus orchestral charts. John’s bass line is the one Enescu wrote in his score and I heard immediately the melodies played with our ensemble,” comments Ban.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the leaders, supporting each other as both composer and musician, though they come from very different backgrounds. Ban was born in the town of Cluj in Transylvania, Romania. After studying piano and composition at the Bucharest Music Academy, he moved to New York City to study at New York’s famed New School Jazz Program. Since then, Ban has played and recorded with some of the best jazz musicians around, including Sam Newsome, Alex Harding, Abraham Burton, Nasheet Waits, Bob Stewart, Barry Altschul, and Reggie Nicholson. Hébert was born in New Orleans, Louisiana where he also attended Loyola University. He then moved to New York to study with Rufus Reid at William Patterson University. Since then, Hébert has been a highly in demand bassist for musicians like Andrew Hill, Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, and Fred Hersch, among many others.

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Track List:

Aria et Scherzino, Aria - 6:37
Octet for Strings Opus 7 - 14:51
Sonota No 3 Opus 25 Malincolico - 9:07
Sonota No 3 Opus 25 Misterioso - 10:45
Orchestral Suite No 1 Opus 9 Prelude - 8:55
Suite No1 for Piano Opus 3, Adagio - 7:10
Symphony No 4, Marziale - 13:57

Arrangements of George Enesco compositions by Lucian Ban and John Hébert.

www.albrechtmaurer.com