Llyr Williams scoops South Bank Sky Arts Award
2 May 2012
© John Ferro Sims
Welsh pianist Llyr Williams has won a South Bank Sky Arts
Awards for his Beethoven sonata series.
In 2011, Williams performed all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas across 14 days at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh. He was featured as ‘One to watch’ in the March/April edition of International Piano this year and told the magazine that although he feels closest to Beethoven’s music he finds some of the sonatas ‘difficult to make sense of’. ‘I don’t feel I’ve reached the top of the mountain with them yet,’ he commented, ‘But you never do with that music’.
The award was announced at the 16th South Bank
Sky Arts Awards ceremony on 1 May. The event is the only one of its kind to
represent a broad spectrum of British arts, including visual arts, opera,
television drama, dance, film and literature.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Roald Dahl’s
Matilda, created by Dennis Kelly and comedian-pianist Tim Minchin, won the
theatre category. Elsewhere, Grayson Perry was handed the Visual Arts award by
Tracey Emin for his hit exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, at the
British Museum.
