Taking your career seriously comes standard in circles of the elite, but in the case of pianist Elizabeth Sombart, such a statement really isn’t doing her output justice, especially when analyzing her work in the new album Singing the Nocturnes.
URL: https://www.elizabethsombart.com
As Sombart explores Chopin’s Nocturnes, both in minor and major keys, she has a removed swagger that feels almost ominous when placed before the depth of content she’s performing, but this never impedes her flow at the keys; in all honesty, I don’t know that someone of her talent is able to be slowed once they find the rhythm they’re looking for in or outside of the studio. This isn’t a player who is coming out of the woodwork to lead a revolution on the back of Singing the Nocturnes, but instead, someone who broke through many years ago, at the Strasbourg Conservatoire and later on under the tutelage of master artists like Peter Feuchtwanger and Hilde Langer-Ruhl. When it comes to the classical lexicon, there is little that linguistics can do to summarize the potency of a piece in comparison to actually listening to it, and in this situation, such a fact is all the more obvious.
The undeniable focus Sombart has when she’s playing is one of the most important themes to behold in all of Singing the Nocturnes, but she’s never made to sacrifice tonality in the name of virtuosity. When she has the opportunity to do something with a minimalist aesthetic influencing her framework, I love that she isn’t afraid to go out on a limb and do it – which is something I’ve been complaining about whenever I listen to the music of her peers in the past couple of years.
When she does come across as being a little reserved – such as in “Nocturnes, Op. 37: II. Andantino in G Major” or the similar “Op. 15: III. Lento in G Minor” – it’s only to facilitate a presence that was already there thanks to the likes of Chopin himself, whose fingerprints are very much felt on every one of the tracks included in this record. It takes something special to say more with a tempo than most artists can with a slew of words, hooks, and highly stylized production techniques, but Sombart makes it look and sound pretty easy in this record (which is likely to leave some of her contemporaries more than a bit jealous this season).
I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Sombart is going to land a Grammy for her efforts in Singing the Nocturnes, which is saying quite a bit when you look at the pedigree of her competition and the sanctity of the award itself. This is an artist who has been working to set herself apart for the better part of the past three decades, and to her credit, it’s paid off with some of the most straightforward and charming classical content to arrive on my desk in a long time. Singing the Nocturnes is quite the bar-raising release, but I’ve got a feeling it’s nowhere near the peak for this gifted musician and performer.
Loretta Kim