The Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams, so modest of demeanour, is not averse to setting himself Herculean keyboard tasks. In this recital he tackled two of the biggest challenges of the Schumann repertoire, rarely programmed together: Kreisleriana Op 16 and the notoriously testing Sonata in F sharp minor, Op 11.
Each afforded a display of boundless virtuosity, but also vivid characterisation of Schumann’s abundance of musical ideas, whether exuberantly energetic or poetic reverie, serious or playful, with Op 16’s portrayal of the fluctuating moods of ETA Hoffman’s Johannes Kreisler mirroring Schumann’s own, much as the earlier sonata already intimates.
All are a reflection of the composer’s passionate love for the young pianist Clara Wieck, then still just a teenager but with talent prodigious enough to perform both these works – her only means of reciprocating the feeling. Too often its contrasts – flights of the imagination, apparent swerves of direction, romanticism in full flow less than a decade after the death of Beethoven – are treated as though arbitrary and facile. But Williams’s approach achieved wonderfully sustained long threads of connection, and an organic propulsion.
He plays with a clarity and rigour that makes everything seem newly minted, yet it’s the ability to produce a deeply expressive singing tone in an infinite range of colours that is the most telling facet of his pianism. In retrospect, in the Mozart F major Sonata K332 which prefaced the Kreisleriana and that of Haydn in E minor Hob XVI:34, which prefaced the Op 11 Sonata, their aria-like slow movements – at first simple arching lines, then elegantly elaborated – seemed to link with Schumann’s slow expanses of intense lyricism, themselves looking ahead to the miraculous flood of song that would emerge after his marriage to Clara. Knowledge of the profound tragedy on the Schumanns’ horizon cannot but be affecting and, here, Williams’s empathy with the intimations of pain in the midst of joie-de-vivre underlined his own profound sensibilities.