Cascade (Cordelia Williams)

Our rating

3

Dr Natasha Loges

Published: November 20, 2023 at 11:09 am

Our review

This album collects various miniatures: Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, Schumann’s Waldszenen and Beethoven’s Bagatelles. Williams gives listeners a keen sense of the strange emotional landscapes each little piece depicts. The opening Bagatelle demonstrates a fine touch and a well-judged tempo, creating an appropriately eldritch effect. Williams can layer textures subtly, for example in Prokofiev’s Lentamente (No. 2), and also achieves exciting contrasts, flipping between crisp and emollient in the Allegretto (No. 4). Her Prokofiev is quite soft-edged, inward and vulnerable. The Waldszenen convincingly follow the Visions, connected by touch and colour. But this is a strange and unbalanced collection that needs a greater imaginative range to sustain interest and bring each vignette to life. The ‘Jagdlied’, for instance, could depict the hunt (or the feel of hunting) more explicitly (the hunting horn is sometimes lost in the texture), while the melody of ‘Abschied’ (not Schumann’s best) needs more songfulness. ‘Vogel als Prophet’ – which should be chilling – feels surprisingly benign. Similarly, Williams’s Beethoven Op. 126 Bagatelles offer points of interest yet need more colour and extremes to make their strangeness convince. There are brilliant moments in No. 4, Presto, but the rapid passages of No. 6 sounded a little tame. The beautiful transparent sound and elfin quality of her Prokofiev is less effective here. The sound quality is clear, if a touch harsh and shallow in louder sections; perhaps more layered recorded sound would have helped sustain interest through this lengthy succession of short, sharply contrasted and mostly odd pieces. Overall, the Prokoviev miniatures are most absorbing. Natasha Loges

Cascade – Beethoven: Bagatelle in C major; Six Bagatelles Prokofiev: Visions fugitives; R Schumann: Waldszenen

Cordelia Williams (piano)

SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0675 65:10 mins

This album collects various miniatures: Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, Schumann’s Waldszenen and Beethoven’s Bagatelles. Williams gives listeners a keen sense of the strange emotional landscapes each little piece depicts.
The opening Bagatelle demonstrates a fine touch and a well-judged tempo, creating an appropriately eldritch effect. Williams can layer textures subtly, for example in Prokofiev’s Lentamente (No. 2), and also achieves exciting contrasts, flipping between crisp and emollient in the Allegretto (No. 4). Her Prokofiev is quite soft-edged, inward and vulnerable.
The Waldszenen convincingly follow the Visions, connected by touch and colour. But this is a strange and unbalanced collection that needs a greater imaginative range to sustain interest and bring each vignette to life. The ‘Jagdlied’, for instance, could depict the hunt (or the feel of hunting) more explicitly (the hunting horn is sometimes lost in the texture), while the melody of ‘Abschied’ (not Schumann’s best) needs more songfulness. ‘Vogel als Prophet’ – which should be chilling – feels surprisingly benign.
Similarly, Williams’s Beethoven Op. 126 Bagatelles offer points of interest yet need more colour and extremes to make their strangeness convince. There are brilliant moments in No. 4, Presto, but the rapid passages of No. 6 sounded a little tame. The beautiful transparent sound and elfin quality of her Prokofiev is less effective here.
The sound quality is clear, if a touch harsh and shallow in louder sections; perhaps more layered recorded sound would have helped sustain interest through this lengthy succession of short, sharply contrasted and mostly odd pieces. Overall, the Prokoviev miniatures are most absorbing. Natasha Loges

Dr Natasha Loges

Journalist and Critic, BBC Music Magazine

Natasha Loges is the head of postgraduate programmes and professor of musicology at the Royal College of Music. She is a regular critic for BBC Music Magazine and broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and BBC TV. Her research interests include German song, concert history, 19th-century performance practice and gender studies, with a particular focus on the lives and music of Brahms and the Schumanns. Her PhD, undertaken at the Royal Academy of Music, was titled 'Text and Context in Brahms's Lieder'. Her books include Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brahms and His Poets (Boydell, 2017), Brahms in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell, 2019) and German Song Onstage (Indiana University Press, 2020).