Grace Williams: Orchestral Works album review – vivid playing and striking drama

Born in Barry, south Wales, in 1906, Grace Williams was part of the same generation of British composers as Imogen Holst, Elizabeth Maconchy and Elisabeth Lutyens. She studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Vaughan Williams and later in Vienna with the Schoenberg pupil Egon Wellesz, and, as this vividly played collection of orchestral pieces from John Andrews and the BBC Philharmonic illustrates very well, those very different influences continued to coexist in Williams’ music. The disc includes what has become the most frequently performed of her works, the Sea Sketches for strings, five miniatures completed in 1944 in which the string writing recalls early Tippett and Britten. Castell Caernarfon is a prelude and processional composed for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, but it’s the strikingly dramatic four Ballads, from 1968, and especially the 1939 Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon, based on an episode from the Mabinogion, and in which Sibelius seems to be added to her personal stylistic mix, that show Williams at her most distinctive.

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