Listeners may not have felt that viola transcriptions of Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe, Op. 48, and Prokofiev's ballet Romeo & Juliet were things missing from their lives, but give this release by violist Timothy Ridout and pianist Frank Dupree a try! The music is varied and imaginative. Instrumental transcriptions of Romantic songs are common enough, but it is actually in the Romeo & Juliet transcription here that Ridout is following in another's path, that of Vadim Borisovsky, who arranged selections from the ballet for viola. It's an effective reduction of the work that keeps the melodies in the viola but gives the piano a great deal to do, catching a surprising amount of orchestral detail. The rendering of Dichterliebe, seemingly simpler, is Ridout's own, and in his booklet, he writes of the considerable experimentation he and Dupree undertook as they attempted to make songs into viola-and-piano pieces. Their solutions add things to the music that were not there, but this is all to the good, for something has to replace the words. The acoustic of the small La Courroie concert space is ideal for what Ridout is trying to do here, and the listener is likely to be drawn in to something that is not quite Prokofiev or Schumann but an experiment or fantasy taking these as points of departure.