It was my great pleasure in 2020 to compose the score for Drew McOnie’s ballet Merlin. From the outset, we agreed that the piece would fully embrace melody and place storytelling at its heart. Working closely from Drew’s detailed synopsis, I began to imagine the ballet unfolding on stage. As I did, melodies and recurring themes emerged—musical ideas that would come to represent characters, emotions, and pivotal moments in the story. As long-time collaborators, Drew and I share a creative language and sensibility, which meant we were almost always instinctively aligned. Dreaming up stories together has always been a joy and a blast of creative fresh air.

We travelled to Leeds to workshop early dance and narrative ideas with the Northern Ballet dancers, staging scenes to preliminary thematic demos. During those few days, we also cast the ballet and spent time getting to know the dancers. This proved invaluable to me as a composer: I could clearly picture the artists who would inhabit Drew’s characters and understand the physical language they would use to tell the story. Combined with Colin Richmond’s evocative costume and set designs, this gave me a rich tonal palette and a vivid sense of three-dimensional characters to bring to life in the music.

I continued shaping the score while walking the wild hills around the Welsh Marches where I live. Melodies sprung to life, birthed from the gnarly hawthorn branches, while rhythmic ideas formed in counterpoint to my footsteps. Something of that wind-blown, enchanted landscape inevitably found its way into the score.

In 2021, the Northern Ballet Sinfonia, under conductor Jonathan Lo, brought the score thrillingly to life. Returning to record it four years later with conductor Daniel Parkinson, I was once again struck by the extraordinary artistry and care of the musicians, and by the clarity and detail Daniel drew from the score. Watching him on the podium at Clockwork Studios in Glasgow, with the music cascading around us, I found myself recalling small choreographic moments I had long since forgotten. The score and the ballet—the orchestra and the dancers—remain inextricably intertwined.

My hope is that, even without seeing the story unfold on stage, you will be able to picture the ballet in your mind’s eye, just as I did when I first sat down to compose—before a single step had been set.

This recording is dedicated to my father, Frank Olding, who would have loved it.– Grant Olding