LDV82

CÉDRIC PESCIA,PHILIPPE CASSARD, pianos 29 What is the recording strategy for a work on this scale? Philippe Cassard: We started by recording one or two complete takes of each movement and then focused on the passages that needed to be improved. There’s one factor you can’t overlook when recording a work of this magnitude: physical, muscular and nervous fatigue. The scherzo, for example, is terribly gruelling, with all the repeats and the da capo. The finale is evenmore exhausting, from themarch and the fugato that follows it onwards, and the whole final section is so fraught with danger. So we had to take a few more breaks, and give priority to improving small sections rather than struggling to play longer passages over and over again. But on the last day, we replayed the whole symphony, and we were very pleased to see that the enormous amount of work we’d done over those four days had paid off!