24 VIRTUOSI We’ve already mentioned the singing element of your playing. That really comes out in the arrangement of El Cant dels Ocells (Song of the birds) by the cellist Pablo Casals, a hymn to peace and an ode to nature. Casals was in the habit of playing this traditional Catalan lullaby as an encore. Over time, it became the song of Spanish refugees. How did you recreate the sound palette of the cello here? Romain Leleu: We did a great deal of work on timbre, and for my part I wondered about the use of the mute. Since we made this arrangement ourselves, we tried out a lot of different ideas, right up to the recording sessions! On the face of it, it seemed quite simple: we wanted to recapture the breath of the cello. In the end, I decided to record the piece unmuted, with a natural sound, but one inspired by the phrasing of the cello. The same question arose with the Berceuse by the Russian composer Reinhold Glière, which I recorded with a mute and the addition of a cloth over the bell of the trumpet! You find a different way of organising your breathing for each work in the programme. It seems pretty improbable that you could manage this with Les Baricades mistérieuses from the sixth ordre of François Couperin’s second book of harpsichord pieces. How did you reproduce the overlapping melodic lines and the lively tempo while preserving continuity in your breathing? Romain Leleu: The great difficulty lies in maintaining a continuous, natural rhythm of breathing. We used various tricks to keep our breathing going in increasingly long musical phrases.
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