Cordelia Williams stands out among many pianists who are well established on social media for her numerous YouTube channel presentations that range from travel diaries and instruction videos to classical music play lists for children. Interestingly, her charming and chatty video persona contrasts with the intense concentration and almost obsessive detailing that usually characterize her recorded interpretations. She doesn’t go for lyric poetry, textural shimmer, or sweeping phrasing so much as rhythmic rectitude and the largest possible portfolio of articulations. Yet, for the most part, the end results on Cascade never sound pedantic or unimaginative.
Beethoven’s C major Bagatelle WoO 56 and Op. 126 Bagatelles are indicative of Williams’ style, where she makes interpretive points through carefully calibrated dynamic contrasts and cogently shaped bass lines. There’s nothing miniature or cameo-like about her Prokofiev Visions Fugitives. No. 5 often comes across as skittish and animated, but Williams casts each contrapuntal entrance in hard stone, while giving the chordal crescendos more than ample due. Her accents across the barlines and attention to rests in No. 6 bring out the music’s resemblance to the opening of Prokofiev’s later Seventh sonata. And few pianists interweave No. 18’s cantabiles to comparably three-dimensional effect.
Whatever Schumann’s Waldszenen lacks in fantasy or magic is compensated by Williams’ heightened harmonic tension in Einsame Blumen, her uncommonly forthright Abschied, and a lithe and almost offhanded Prophet Bird, although the pianist’s emphatic downbeats don’t allow Jagdlied to take wing. An absorbing release.
