Session Report: Waxing Lyrical

‘In general,’ says the British viola player Timothy Ridout, ‘the way I like to work – with practising, recording and everything – is not to spend three hours banging my head against a wall, but to spend an hour and a half or two hours maximum and then to take a break. I’m happy to work all day and right into the night, but I need that kind of reality check every once in a while to reset things mentally and physically.’

Conditions were ideal, then, for recording the multiple short movements of his latest album in July 2020 at music venue La Courroie, a converted factory with artists’ accommodation near Avignon in the Provence region of France. The album pairs Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, in Ridout’s own transcription, with Vadim Borisovsky’s arrangement of movements from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suites. His third album as a headline artist…