Martin Fröst explains his exploration of the layers of music history on his latest Sony Classical album.

You’ve explored dance and folk music in your recordings and performances before but Roots is quite different, where did the idea come from?

The idea came from Dollhouse, which was not a recording project but a concert project. I premiered it two years ago and it was about communication: soloist-musician, conductor-musician, and it involved research about movement and music. I performed two pieces that were choreographed and the choreography worked as a signal to the orchestra – instead of conducting – so it was a big experiment. I wanted to create a new concept after that, so I got an urge to develop this way-out performing. It was a performing concept first, called Genesis. Roots is the music from the Genesis project. When I started work it had a few elements from Dollhouse; it still had music-movement connections. I also had the idea of performing works back-to-back: every piece went into the next without silence. I linked them together and created an order so they worked key-wise and the themes were related to each other. I then asked Sony if the music...