TREMENDOUS ENGAGEMENT

'... the listener who attends carefully to this disc
will be handsomely rewarded.'

Adrian Williams on record -
with PETER DALE

Adrian Williams' Images of a Mind must represent one of the most substantial bodies of music by a living composer to have been written for cello. Raphael Wallfisch (is he the dedicatee?) responds to this gift for his instrument with tremendous engagement. It might be his own work, such is the conviction with which it is played: effortless virtuosity; unerringly intelligent sympathy between cello and piano; deeply expressive colouring of tone.

W.H.Davies -- the Autobiography of a Super-tramp man, the poet of the open, honest road -- has been quarried for epigraphs to the programme notes, as well he might be because Williams himself is the poet and cartographer of a particular world of sound evoked in him by wide Welsh, Irish, Celtic landscapes -- airy and boundless above, caverned with myth beneath. So far, then, as the music is prompted and nurtured by visual landscape, by so much does it come across as aural landscape, and Williams himself (as he readily agrees) something of a late Romantic. Certainly the willingness to communicate and connect with his audience suggests just that, but there is more to this music than that comfortable, reassuringly attractive label implies. Landscapist he may be, but it's as Inscapist (to borrow a visual expression from the poet Hopkins -- himself hardly a typical Romantic) that Williams really makes his mark. The very title of this disc -- Images of a Mind -- should correct the impression one might otherwise have that this music is going to be a gentle ramble through the landscape rooms of a charming, provincial West Country art gallery, and no more.

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