Mátyás Szandai, Mathias Lévy & Miklós Lukács - Bartók Impressions (2018)

The music of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) is contemporary music - contemporary to us. This is the claim of three young men who have already proved separately that they are complete, universal musicians. Neither frontiers, nor unknown territories alarm them, if their inspiration or inner prompting happens to lead that particular way.This isn't the kind of project that's planned by producers working with a marketing team and a listeners' focus group in a curtain-lined laboratory. Two good friends who live close to each other in Paris, who've been playing together for years, have long been talking and dreaming of this. They start to make music together, trying out themes and melodies. Bartók is their starting point, and improvisation, which to them is like air. Their ideas have long since been revolving around two axes. Starting from folksongs arranged by Bartók, the striking themes in the 44 Duos for Two Violins, and Mikrokosmos, they soon get a clear idea of where they want to go. They quickly decide two things: one, to involve another traditional acoustic instrument; two, to steer clear of the forms of American jazz and blues. Not, of course, because it is foreign to them, quite the opposite. The reason is rather that they can only preserve the authenticity of this world by keeping this distance. The violin, bass, and the cimbalom they chose as companion, the only chordal instrument, form a sound which, though not alien to the spirit of jazz, is all the more so to its musical material. Though one of the trio is French, another a France-based Hungarian, and the third Hungarian, from the first notes the three musicians are speaking the same language. It's a fantastic experience, how they use the words of a Hungarian composer who died 72 years ago to form their own, contemporary sentences. Szandai's view is that the three of them are twenty-first century folk musicians, or rather, folk musicians that play the music of the 21st century.