Cascade

Description

SOMM Recordings announces Cascade, the exhilarating new recital by pianist Cordelia Williams featuring music by Beethoven, Schumann and Prokofiev. Cascade explores music's mercurial ability to change in an instant, to reveal depths beneath the surface, and to illustrate, as Williams says, "that the whole world can change entirely in one twist of perspective, one change of angle, to offer a glimpse of something bigger". Early and late Beethoven bookend the programme. Unpublished in his lifetime, the C major Bagatelle (WoO 56) flickers and glints, sparkles and surprises with kaleidoscope-like brilliance. His Op.126 Six Bagatelles - among the very last pieces he wrote for solo piano - alternate between the introspective and the garrulous, each turned inside out to reveal new facets and features. A variegated collection of 20 miniatures with hints of Chopin, Scriabin and Shostakovich to be found, Prokofiev's Visions fugitives, Op.22 are essentially a series of meditations, each individually pursuing a specific idea or mood while collectively exploring the hinterland between surface appearance and what lies beneath; and all expressed with comparable crystalline clarity. Schumann's Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), his last major cycle for solo piano, is an enchanted landscape lit up by beguiling pastoralism and shadow-cast by darker recesses of the imagination. Two sides of the same coin: Arcadia in excelsis, and red in tooth and claw. Booklets notes, as with all of Cordelia Williams' recent SOMM releases, have been written by Michael Quinn.