Llyr Williams

Llŷr Williams, in an astonishing recital that left me reaching for the stars with a look of inane wonderment on my face, gave an enthralling account of Ives’s colossal Concord Sonata in a 50-minute epic performance that had the Queen’s Hall audience roaring for more.

…This was a performance of startling intellectual lucidity (the long, discursive opening movement, Emerson, has never seemed so logical and coherent) and sometimes dazzling keyboard skill…

Combining acute sensitivity with intellectual rigour, Williams' insight into harmonic language – its emotional and structural significance – marked the Sonata in D minor Op 31, No 2. The veiled mystery of the opening arpeggiated chords was wonderfully poised; and his understanding of the composer's revolutionary use of the sustaining pedal was revealed brilliantly in the finale of the Waldstein sonata, Op 54. This piece represents a milestone for Beethoven, and the stature of Williams' performance suggested that he is approaching a similarly important transition. As if to reinforce that, his encore was no mere bagatelle, but the third movement of Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, "The Alcotts". Delivered with unerring perception, it was a perfect ending to a remarkable evening.

Llŷr Williams was the soloist in Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, bringing his customary clarity and insight to the playing, balancing precision with expressive tone, as well as underlining the quirky playfulness of the final Giocoso.

Williams is a master of soft tone, and the largo of Op 7 contained plenty of that. He also relishes Beethoven’s eccentricities, while tending to look eccentric himself, and this served the F sharp major in good stead. His has been a fascinating exploration of the sonatas, and of what they mean to us today.

I heard three of Llŷr Williams's complete Beethoven piano sonatas recitals at Greyfriars kirk, each yet better than the last. As inward and serious as Melvyn Tan is outgoing and smiling, Williams communes with the piano as if seeking new layers in a palimpsest. The results, as in the Op 10 set last Monday, can be revelatory.

The real creativity takes place on the Fringe, which this year features an unexpectedly vibrant classical offering, headed by Greyfriars Kirk’s cycle of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas and string quartets. Llyr Williams’s titanic traversal of the Beethoven Op 109 Sonata on Saturday had “festival experience” written over it in letters 10 times as big as the standard symphonic programmes we are promised during the next three weeks.

Williams’ gift is to inhabit Beethoven’s writing and take it to the n^th degree of intensity. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the opening chords of the Pathetique sonata sound so granite-like and menacing and throughout the evening he constantly forced the listener to reassess their impressions of these familiar works. The opening of Op. 2, No. 1, for example, felt jaunty and angular before turning into something dark and brooding in the development, and the fistfuls of notes in the finale were electrifying. No-one new to this work would have guessed that this was Beethoven’s first published sonata: in Williams’ hands it felt like a work of staggering maturity and scale.

His performance was near-miraculous; and there were very clear reasons behind its towering success. His intellectual command was reflected in the structural integrity of his interpretation, from the unhurried majesty of the opening, the compactness of the Scherzo and the colossal profundity he revealed in the slow movement, which appeared to last for an eternity, to the nimbleness and agility with which he negotiated the terrifying polyphony of the finale... His first half performance of the opus 90 Sonata was another miracle, of velvety Schubertian lyricism, with the melody elevated almost to a state of grace; while the great opus 101 A major Sonata was delivered as a perfect unity.

All four of the sonatas that Williams (inset) played so brilliantly, so clearly and so idiomatically are extremely well known: the opus 26 in A flat, the Moonlight, the Pastoral, and the G major Sonata opus 31 number 1. Each is quite different to the other and, as was evident in Williams’s searching performances, each challenges the boundaries of the piano sonata in its shape, its form, its structure and its continuity. Williams underlined the fact, through his compelling performances, that Beethoven wasn’t just writing a series of sonatas: he was actually driving a coach and horses through the concept of what a sonata might be in its form.

Some pianists would have opted for extrovert readings of these works in order to emphasise their differences, but Williams took the opposite approach. Nothing was overstated, the opening of op 7 unhurried despite the urgency of its motif, the peculiar wit of op 14 no 2, all strange syncopations and surprising disjunctions, approached with dry, gentle humour rather than treated as slapstick. The final sonata of the programme, B major opus 22, was the grandest of the set but although the scale here was greater, the writing more dramatic, Williams’s approach was poised and graceful.

I believe that Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams is one of the greatest of the modern day… In the immense variety across the four sonatas he played he demonstrated complete structural mastery. Within the complexities of the opening section of the Pathetique, he created an enormous breadth. Everything was unhurried, and the music just seemed to stretch its limbs, accommodating itself to the generous expanse of space created by the pianist.

Llŷr Williams shaped the sonata perfectly, with just the right amount of angst in the opening movement while maintaining the lyrical contrasts as the movement progressed. In the serene adagio he played with a wonderfully light touch, portraying the full emotional substance of the movement, while the spirited finale had all the youthful energy of the young composer. Here Williams demonstrated his immense technique, with rapid playing of the scalic passages yet always maintaining the lyrical qualities of the themes.

On top of that, the sheer prophetic nature of much of his music gleamed in Williams’s super-articulate, passionate and intellectual performances, from hints of later Beethoven, harmonies that looked round the corner to Schubert, and even one astonishing passage in the Opus 2 C major Sonata, whose leaning notes and expressive sighs conjured the music of Schumann. In Beethoven, as represented by this magical musician, lies everything that followed.

The first of the three sonatas has claims to be the most immediately striking of the three. Its opening allegro was played by Williams with a persuasive and engaging energy (after a slightly tentative opening), in a performance which captured both the passion and the elegance which coexist in surprising complementarity in this movement, a complementarity expressed both by neat contrasts and by unexpected (yet, with the advantage of hindsight, altogether inevitable) reconciliations of diverse musical materials. Some pianists have perhaps made more of the drama of this fist movement, but Williams’s interpretation clarified structure and pattern with impressive lucidity. The ensuing adagio was an exercise in youthful nobility, which Williams invested with an attractive cantabile quality; here, again, he provided a model of structural clarity, not least in the way he phrased which the elaborated repetitions of the movement’s themes. The judgement of tempo here was persuasively impressive and the whole fused nobility with tenderness. The third movement had a well-considered sense of scale, avoiding the kind of inflation which performances on a modern grand can all too easily acquire in movements such as this. The interpretation of the closing prestissimo had real fire, imbued with a precipitous, stormy momentum, the triplet arpeggios of the closing coda played with gratifying conviction and facility… Llyr Williams is a pianist of very real quality. His greatest virtues, at present, relate to the firmness of his structural grasp and his sense of musical architecture, his capacity to put the music’s organising principles clearly before the ears and minds of his hearers, but never at the cost of the merely reductive.