Wagner’s operas have inspired innumerable piano transcriptions from Carl Tausig to Zoltán Kocsis but those to which pianists most frequently turn are by Liszt. To the half dozen of these Llyˆr Williams has selected, he adds three more: his own arrangements of Glenn Gould’s Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Prelude to Die Meistersinger transcriptions as well as his own version of three scenes from Parsifal. It makes for a varied and rewarding programme enriched by Williams’s velvet touch, meticulous voicing, attention to detail and judiciously graded dynamics. For me, he is at his best in the music from Parsifal (his transcription of the Good Friday Music is not dissimilar to that by Joseph Rubinstein), quite beautifully realised, as is the spaciously phrased Liebestod and the less familiar (but no less powerful) ‘Santo spirito cavaliere’ from Rienzi. What I miss in Williams’s playing is that last ounce of tension and sense of mounting excitement (Entry of the Guests and Die Meistersinger). Here and in his delivery of the Spinning Chorus (compare with the carefree Paderewski on his famous 1924 recording), accuracy and caution do not take him far enough beyond the printed page.

Williams punctuates the transcriptions with some of Wagner’s original piano works (he admits that he learnt of their existence, surprisingly, only last year). If you too are one of those unaware that the Sorcerer of Bayreuth wrote anything for piano then you haven’t missed anything. The interminable (26'01") Fantasy, Op 3, written as a 19-year-old, dribbles along with bits of second-hand Bach, Weber and Mendelssohn popping up here and there, underpinned by a portentous Beethovenian solemnity. Stephan Möller in his 1992 recording (Koch, 6/93) takes a livelier view of this, though cannot compete with Williams’s tonal finesse. The five other mercifully shorter works, no more than period curios, confirm the wisdom of Wagner’s decision to leave piano composition and transcriptions to his father-in-law.