Okros Ensemble

The Okros Ensemble has made a career from mining Hungarian, Romanian, and gypsy folk legends — dynamic music from Transylvania.

In this area of Europe, Transylvanian folk music is still alive and an integral part of the cultural fabric. This is due to the fact that the area was isolated politically during the post-World War II years. Under communism, the state attempted to homogenize the musical heritage of the satellite nations into manageable uniformity. In Hungary, people were actually told that they had no real music of their own.

But in opposition, young Hungarian musicians started filtering into Transylvania, in Romania, where a large Hungarian population still lived the village life that had been stamped out elsewhere. They collected songs, brought them back to Hungary and started a vibrant folk renaissance, called the Tanchaz (dance house) movement.

Okros Ensemble includes: Csaba Okros, Miklos Molnar (violin); Laszlo Mester (viola); Laszlo Kelemen (three-stringed viola); Robert Door (double bass); Kalman Balogh (cimbalom).

— Courtesy Calabash Music