Williams' program is a kind of sampler of his obsessions. The first half features Debussy (Suite Bergamasque) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 53, "Waldstein"). After intermission, it's vocal music via Liszt with a set of his Schubert song transcriptions followed by a lengthy take on Bellini's opera "Norma."
Three years ago Signum Records issued "Wagner Without Words," a two-disc set of Williams performing at the keyboard music from every major Wagner opera, plus other odds and ends by the composer. Most of the opera transcriptions come from Liszt. For the sake of completeness, Williams' audio producer Judith Sherman persuaded him to include his own original take on "Parsifal." Scheduled for release next year is a 12-CD box set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas. After that comes a Schubert collection, which is still in the recording phase but will probably amount to six or seven CDs.
Asked how he manages such a quantity of music, Williams replies, "I don't know any secret to memorizing a vast amount of literature. I just work at it as a normal person would go at a job, with seven to eight hours a day practicing as a regular routine."
"The music is in the fingers and in the head, a combination of the two," he explains. "Everybody relies on the muscle memory, but it mustn't take over. You always need the brain working out where it's going next and what's important."
Sometimes all systems fail, even for virtuosos at the top of their game.
"Memory slips happen all the time, but it depends on how bad they are," continues Williams. "The fugue in Beethoven's Opus 110 is a nightmare. If that goes wrong, there's no way to find your way out. It's a good idea to take music for that, to just have one piece of paper on the piano for security. That's the most extreme example."
There are a couple of monuments of the repertoire -- Ives' "Concord" Sonata and Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata — where the beauty and pleasures of the music took their time in revealing themselves to Williams.
