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Sonata in F minor, Op.2, No.1
Sonata in A, Op.2, No.2
Sonata in C, Op.2, No.3
 

These three sonatas of Beethoven’s youth (the first to be graced with an Opus number, but not the first that he wrote) are, in important respects already very characteristic of their composer, even if one wouldn’t readily confuse them with the products of Beethoven’s maturity. As in Beethoven’s later work, these sonatas simultaneously exist in an obvious continuity with what had preceded them (insofar as they clearly echo the piano writing of, say, Haydn and Clementi) and also, in what is only a seeming paradox, subvert and tease the expectations which the listener’s familiarity with these precedents, with the tradition out of which the sonatas grow, will have encouraged them to bring to the hearing of this music. They are, that is to say, at one and the same time, profoundly traditional and passionately rebellious – they already embody the essence of Beethoven, in short.

The fine Welsh pianist Llyr Williams, now in his mid-thirties, is currently engaged in a series of concerts which will see him play all of the Beethoven sonatas during 2010 (amidst recitals and concerts, in the first half of the year, in Tokyo, in Innsbruck and at the Wigmore Hall). This concert, in the admirable and valuable series jointly promoted by Cwpanaur and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was part of this ongoing cycle.

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.

The second sonata in the set is, to a degree, differentiated from its two fellows by its more extensive use of counterpoint. In the initial allegro, Williams’s performance was, once more, striking for the clarity with which it exposed the architecture of Beethoven’s writing – a consistent virtue of Williams’s current playing. The stately slow movement, with its long lines over a walking bass, was invested with real solemnity, though Williams also found some gentleness, and even playfulness, in certain passages. The allegretto which follows is dominated by short figures, in contrast to the long melodic phrases which had characterised the slow movement; Williams’s touch struck me as just a little heavy in its opening pages – though it is fair to say that these are pages which generally sound better on the kind of instrument for which Beethoven was writing than they do on the modern grand. There was a delightful grace, though, to Williams’s treatment of the trio. The closing grazioso was just that, and Williams’s reading had about it an attractive, organic fluency, the relative complexities of Beethoven’s structure negotiated with an air of naturalness and relaxation and a sense of power held in check.

The final sonata of the set was once described by Tovey as “luxurious and loosely constructed”, which surely overstates the case or, at any rate, overlooks the real virtues of the music. In the first movement, full of sparkle and invention, Llyr Williams supplied all the virtuosity the music demands, in a performance of considerable panache and relaxed precision. In the adagio the syncopated upbeats and the telling silences of the main theme were very well handled; there was a grave spirituality at times, and the dramatic moment when the initial motif returns in C major (in an e major slow movement) was genuinely arresting; the final cadences had a poignant inconclusiveness which made the transition to the glittering runs of the scherzo, with its imitative writing, all the more effective. The allegro finale, a fast movement in 6/8 time, has an all-embracing vitality and wit, qualities which Williams embraced wholeheartedly. The whole made for an exhilarating conclusion to a Sunday lunchtime very well spent.

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. If I have a slight reservation it is perhaps that his playing, as yet, doesn’t have quite the variety of tone that it might. But his work has a genuine substance, an intellectual weight and (apt) gravity often absent from the playing of some of the more hyped pianists of his generation. Those able to hear all of Williams’s 2010 Beethoven sonata cycle are to be envied.

Glyn Pursglove

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