Liszt: Excerpts from Années de pèlerinage - Italie & other works

'Pèlerinage highlights from Wales's pre-eminent pianist' (Gramophone)

'The musical demands presented by any Liszt programme are so wide-ranging that nor even a pianist of Llyr Williams's class will necessarily succeed in meeting all of them, all of the time. By the same token, there will be plentiful areas that do succeed, and brilliantly' (BBC Music Magazine)» More
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING
'The core of Llyr Williams' recital disc is a selection of five pieces from the second, Italian, book of Liszt's Annees de Pelerinage-the little Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa and the three Petrarch Sonnets, leading up to the great, climactic Dante Sonata. As he also showed in his Edinburgh festival recital last week, Williams is a superb Liszt interpreter, never content to use even the most technically demanding music as just a vehicle for flashy display, but always looking beneath the elaborate surfaces for deeper rigour and meaning. That doesn't mean he ever understates the music's sense of theatre or misjudges its sense of scale, though; there's a tremendous power and intensity to his Dante Sonata that's maintained from the taut opening phrases to the very final bars. He prefaces his sequence with the Tarentella that ends Venezia e Napoli, Liszt's supplement to the Italian Annee, and adds the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude and the transcription of the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as mighty, powerfully wrought postscripts' (The Guardian)