(Avant-Garde, Fusion, Modern Classical) Lucian Ban & John Hebert (w. Ralph Alessi, Tony Malaby, Mat Maneri etc) - Enesco Re-Imagined {w. BONUS Video} {Sunnyside SCS 1259, USA} - 2010, FLAC (image+.cue) lossless

By RAUL D'GAMA ROSE
Published: December 7, 2010
Lucian Ban / John Hébert: Enesco Re-Imagined
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 Hébert, 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.

March 2011
Lucian Ban & John Hebert
Enesco Re-Imagined
Sunnyside
By Michael J. West
Enesco Re-Imagined is visionary third-stream music. That’s undercounting the streams, actually; the album is a compound of musical compounds. Romanian composer Georges Enesco, whose work is here re-orchestrated by pianist Lucian Ban and bassist John Hébert, was known for molding doina—a Romanian folk form—into classical structures and settings. Upon this, Ban and Hébert superimpose avant-garde jazz interplay and improvisatory language via the frontline of trumpeter Ralph Alessi, saxophonist Tony Malaby, violinist Albrecht Maurer and violist Mat Maneri. Drummer Gerald Cleaver finds a percussive ally in Bengali tabla player Badal Roy.
While Maurer is the major melodic force, Roy makes the album. His tablas supplement the Gypsy dance rhythms and provide the backbone to “Octet for Strings, Op. 7,” and he combines the percussion with vocal chants on three other tracks. The effect is particularly stirring on “Orchestral Suite No. 1, Opus 9: Prelude,” when Roy melds with Hébert and Cleaver in the low-key but relentless thump of the fusion era, while Maneri improvises darkly over it. Nearly as powerful is Alessi, whose trumpet work is unblemished and elegant. He weeps on “Aria et Scherzino, Aria,” glories in flourishing “Octet for Strings,” and all but prances out of the speakers with his solo (interpolated by Ban) on “Sonata No. 3, Op. 25-Malincolio.”
Nevertheless, Hébert and Ban are the stars here. The pianist insists in his liner notes that Enesco belongs in the pantheon of 20th-century composers, and this recording places Ban and Hébert among the great 21st-century interpreters.

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 fiddler 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 finally 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 finished 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.)

Editorial Review:
The combination of jazz and classical music isn't a new thing. Jazz musicians have looked to classical music for inspiration for a long while. Look no further than Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky or John Lewis with the Modern Jazz Quartet. There was even a defined movement in the Third Stream. It is the more recent efforts to reinterpret classical works that have proven the mettle of jazz musicians/composers. Lucian Ban and John Hébert provide an astounding example while creating a distinct and original musical expression based on the framework of another on Enesco Re-Imagined