NDR Bigband / Geir Lysne

Geir Lysne and the NDR Bigband enter into a musical dialogue with the pianist, composer and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartok – all as part of the NDR Festival »Kosmos Bartók«.

The fictitious conversations that Geir Lysne has with his colleague, who died back in 1945, do not by any means lead to faithful quotations from Bartók’s catalogue of works. Instead, they result in a notion of how Bartók might compose today. The question of whether the great modernist Bartók may even have opened up his music to jazz and Lysne’s idea of ultimately leaving the shaping of his compositions to the improvisation and creative interaction of the musicians in the ensemble.

Such thoughts and reflections on tradition and progress in music, the interaction between composer and performer, between soloist and ensemble, individual and collective form the basis for Geir Lysne’s vibrant compositions for a large jazz orchestra.

If Lysne and Bartók were to meet, there would be no shortage of things to talk about. As far apart as the two musicians’ aesthetic worlds might be, they share a number of predilections in their search for inspiration. Both are interested in traditional forms of music, in traditional dances and rhythms, and in traditional scales that have very little in common with the required purity of well-tempered European art music.

Art and folk music, tradition and modernity – Béla Bartók masterfully combined all of these into a language of his own. Now Alan Gilbert and the NDR orchestras dive deep into Bartók’s musical cosmos.

NDR Bigband

director Geir Lysne

Geir Lysne
Bartók Conversations