LDV75

ADRIEN LA MARCA 15 What links do you find between the three works? Formy first recording (‘EnglishDelight’), I structured awhole programme of English music around a sonata. Here too, I wanted my programme to have a meaning to it. You know, I like taking time to conceive my discs because I want everything to resonate together and make sense! Walton wrote for the cinema. His concerto, as lyrical and epic as one could wish for, genuinely sounds like film music. My project started off with Walton, and then I looked for cohesion around that. I could have recorded Walton, Bartók and Prokofiev, but that would have been too predictable . . . Musically, a programme has to tell a story. Here the viola becomes the central character, the hero of each piece, within an almost cinematographic adventure. The fact that Romeo and Juliet is a love story, an adventure story, a story of families andof political upheavals that has beenused inmanyfilmsmade it an ideal coupling forWalton. But the great discovery of this recording is Gwenaël Mario Grisi’s On the Reel , whose style of writing is inspired by filmmusic and music for video games. For me, Romeo and Juliet and Walton’s Concerto evoke stories of heroes. In On the Reel , the viola is the hero of the story; its scenario, or rather, the individual scenes, are entitled ‘The Hero’s Battle’, ‘The Hero is wounded’, ‘Heroic Fantasy’! So, Walton, Prokofiev, and Grisi: that was it, I had my project. The three styles come together, hand in hand, with the viola at the centre, the hero of the story.