The Gracias Gustavo era at the LA Phil finds a fresh visual partner in artist Alexandra Grant, whose kaleidoscopic translations of text-based narrative into pure, expressive image now adorn a pair of definitive Prokofiev recordings from Deutsche Grammophon. For the digital release of Romeo and Juliet, captured as it soared alongside choreography by Benjamin Millepied’s LA Dance Project at Disney Hall, the label worked with Grant’s 2022 painting Bounty, an explosion of violet and crimson where submerged text on love and hate vibrates with the same tragic abundance as the score itself. This curated resonance thence evolved into a bespoke creation for the imminent Peter and the Wolf, featuring Viola Davis’ star-turn narration at the Hollywood Bowl performance—a night of musical history so outrageously gorgeous that it necessitated an entirely new, interdisciplinary vector in its lineage.
Grant’s eye-widening, poetically thoughtful, and somehow both unsettling and adorable Peter and the Wolf cover-art is a sharp, graphic dream inside a forest of melting lines and surrealist collage. Here, the iconic yellow of the DG brand is a main character, offsetting a landscape defined by ferality and containment. Like Grant’s arrangements, young Peter’s journey lingers at the threshold between instinct and discipline. “I wanted to show Peter as a young boy who follows his own intuition, will, and wildness in his relationships with the animal characters, and who is transformed by them,” Grant told Music Connection in an interview. “As Peter enters the adult world, his understanding of the wild changes; the wolf ultimately ends up in a zoo.”
Grant’s is an eccentric visual libretto rooted in a personal lineage of orchestral discovery. “I grew up with Prokofiev’s music,” Grant recalls, and for her, like so many Gen X kids, “Peter and the Wolf served as an introduction to the instruments and sound of the orchestra.” This commission was an opportunity to engage a new generation—while also dealing directly with its history. “The cover was inspired by the famous yellow cartouche, which I used as a collage element, and its brightness influenced the color palette,” Grant says. “I also studied the cover of the Beatles’ Revolver album, designed by Klaus Voorman, who effectively combined line drawing and collage.” In fact, Grant has been utilizing a collage-inflected aesthetic in her painting practice for years, along with a salient relationship to historical texts from the West’s pantheon of origin stories and folklore—but maybe not with this many cats, wolves, and ducks.
