1 CD
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Label Signum Classics |
UPC 0635212029022 |
Catalogue number SIGCD 290 |
Release date 01 December 2012 |
“To my ears, Llŷr Williams is one of the great pianists of our age.”
John Gilhooly, CBE.
Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams is widely admired for his profound musical intelligence, and for the expressive
and communicative nature of his interpretations. He has performed with all the major UK orchestras
under conductors including Michael Tilson Thomas, Jiří Bělohlávek, Carlo Rizzi, Vasily Petrenko, Jaime
Martín, Osmo Vanska , Joseph Swensen, Grant Llewellyn and Jac Van Steen, and he has a particularly
longstanding relationship with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with whom he has in recent
seasons performed concertos ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to Bartók and Mathias.
As a recitalist, Llŷr Williams regularly performs at venues and festivals including Wigmore Hall, Perth
Concert Hall, the St David’s and Dora Stoutzker Halls in Cardiff, and the Edinburgh and East Neuk
Festivals in the UK, Salle Bourgie in Montreal and the Capital Region Classical series in Schenectady,
USA. He has a long association with the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where he has,
among others, given multi-recital cycles of the music of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. As a chamber musician he has performed with artists including Bryn Terfel, Natalie Clein, Tim Hugh, Katarina
Nazarova, Jamie Barton and Andrei Kymach. His particular interest in song repertoire is reflected in his
20-year association as one of the two official pianists of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
Llŷr Williams’ long and successful collaboration with Signum Records includes the 8-disc box-set ‘A
Schubert Journey’ (2020), the 12-volume ‘Beethoven Unbound’ (2018), a ‘Wagner Without Words’
double album (2014) and highlights from Liszt’s ‘Années de pèlerinage‘ (2012).
A former BBC New Generation Artist and Borletti-Buitoni Trust award recipient, Llŷr Williams was
born in Pentrebychan, North Wales, and read music at The Queen’s College, Oxford before taking up
a postgraduate scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal
Welsh College of Music and Drama, and in 2017 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the
University of Wales. He is also currently Artist-in-Association at the Royal Welsh College of Music and
Drama, a patron of the Gower Festival, and Associate Artist at the Cowbridge Festival.
If you would open any biography of Franz Liszt, you would probably mostly read about his disquiet life as a piano virtuoso, his passionate love life, and the return to his catholic roots at the end of his life. Although all of this might be true, it only scratches the surface of his comprehensive musical personality. Liszt was a pianist, conductor, teacher and organiser, but above all he was a composer of a voluminous, capricious body of work. Even though his piano works formed his core business, he gave rise to the symphonic poem, got rid of the organ's stuffy appearance, and reinvigorated the oratorio. Moreover, with his piano transciptions of Bach's organ works and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, he was an advocate of both old and new music.
Together with his son-in-law Richard Wagner, he was in the forefront of the Romantic movement and anticipated the musical revolutions of the early 20th century with his new composition techniques.