SOMM Recordings announces the return of pianist Cordelia Williams with Nightlight, a compelling exploration of the contrariness of night, its turmoil, terror and tenderness, and the longing for light.

Inspired by Williams’s experience mothering her two infant children in the isolating dead of night while the world around her slept, Nightlight is dedicated, she says, “to the many people who… feel alone in the darkness. To those who experience despair or sublime melancholy during the hours before the dawn, who are searching for solace, peace or impossible hope. To anyone lost who is waiting to be found by the light”.

Spanning four centuries, from Thomas Tomkins’s exquisitely melancholic A Sad Pavan for these Distracted Times to jazz virtuoso Bill Evans’s hypnotic, fantasy-laced Peace Piece, the recital moves from sleep-inducing nightfall – Mozart’s D minor Fantasia, K397 – to waking hopes for the new dawn in what Williams describes as the “shimmering hope, glory just beyond the horizon” of Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn).

The becalmed and tempest-driven waters of the ocean in Scriabin’s Piano Sonata no.2 (Sonata-Fantasy) prove a perfect metaphor for the stilled and turbulent currents of the night. Plunging into night’s darkest, most disturbed places, the dislocations of Schubert’s late Sonata in C minor, D958, are salved by two soothingly nocturne-like Liszt Consolations.

“The music recorded here,” says Williams, “sees our loneliness and darkness, recognizes and validates those unutterable feelings, and reaches out a hand of consolation.”

Piano winner of the 2006 BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition, Cordelia Williams’s previous SOMM releases include her acclaimed coupling of Bach and Arvo Pärt (SOMMCD 0186) hailed by International Piano as “a magnificently stimulating concept, brilliantly recognised” and well-received recitals of Schubert (SOMMCD 0127) and Schumann (SOMMCD 0150).