Transylvanian Folk Songs - The Bela Bartók Field Recordings

There is a lot of history to unpack here, so to keep this from getting bogged down... the essentials: Bela Bartók was a Hungarian ethnomusicologist who went around in the early 20th century and recorded native Romanians playing their traditional folk songs. He collected thousands of songs. This album is not a simple re-recording of those songs but rather a re-imagining. These three musicians (piano, sax/clarinet, viola) got together and took a selection of Bartók's field recordings as inspiration, composing their own pieces inspired by and drawing heavily upon those original tunes.