LDV88-9

17 DAVID GRIMAL This is your third complete recording of the set, after your versions of 1999 and 2008. What is new about the version you’re offering us now? These successive recordings of a work are clearly progress reports on who we are. For the first one, I was totally reckless, in the surge of youth. It was a repertory that had structured me, but I really threw myself into my playing, with great freedom, full of carefree enthusiasm, ‘happy-go-lucky’. When I made the second one, I was going through a crisis in my personal life at the age of thirty-five. It was a moment of introspection, navigating between the conscious and the unconscious. This third version has been the hardest, the one that gave me most trouble, now that I’m nearly fifty. At that age, you have the impression you’ve got a grip on yourself, thanks to the experience of teaching and of trying out different styles, especially in Baroque music. The impression you’re at the crossroads and have the ability to synthesise. And, in fact, it’s not so. The doors you’ve opened lead to new perspectives that question the extent of your understanding, and that’s what’s so extraordinary! The more I think I understand, the more I realise that I don’t understand anything. ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’, as Socrates put it . . . It’s paradoxical. I have the feeling that I have more freedom than before because these texts accompany me like my daily bread, but the further I go along this path, the further the horizon is from me. That’s the beauty of great texts, and that’s the beauty of this music. It sends you back to yourself, and you’ve never finished with yourself.