REVIEW: Chopin Inspired Pianist Elizabeth Sombart Has Her Eyes on The Prize
Human artistry that transcends genders, borders, nationalities, and creeds is needed more than ever before. Various forces are pushing and clawing each day to partition the world along battle lines rather than attempting to recognize and celebrate the common threads tying us together. The unfettered expression of the human heart through whatever artistic medium possesses a timeless quality that outstrips anything in your news feed today, dwarfs watercooler chatter and has a lasting transformative effect that you can’t measure in votes, ratings, or sales.
WIKIPEDIA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Sombart
URL: https://www.elizabethsombart.com/en/home-english/
Elizabeth Sombart is working in that tradition. Sombart isn’t producing disposable work intent on distracting listeners for a time with brief entertainments but, instead, delivering dialogues via her piano that communicate music’s enduring value. Her long study of classical music isn’t an academic exercise that she bloodlessly reproduces for listeners; one listen to her recent Singing the Nocturnes testifies to the invigorating connection Sombart establishes. She speaks to us through her instrument, not words, and inspires us to heed the better angels of our nature.
The Strasbourg-born pianist delivered her first public performance at eleven years old. She decamped for Buenos Aires to study with Bruno Leonardo Gelber after winning the National Piano and Chamber Music Awards’ first prize. Sombart moved on after that to London and Vienna where she studied with Peter Feuchtwanger and Hilde Langer-Ruhl, respectively.
The decade following this saw Sombart further burnish her credits with ten years working at the Hochschule fur Musik Mainz alongside Sergiu Celibidache. She founded
Fondation Résonnance twenty-four years ago and its reach has spread to several countries since its birth. Fondation Résonnance’s mission is varied, but its primary goal is ensuring free music education to anyone seeking it out. An ancillary aim of the organization is outreach that brings music to unlikely venues such as prisons, hospitals, and orphanages.
She is not without honors in her native France. The French government bestowed one of its highest civilian honors on Sombart in 2006 when it awarded her the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite for Lifetime Achievement. Accolades continued coming, however, as the government awarded her again in 2008, this time when it made her a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
The work, however, never ceases to matter. She doesn’t rest on her laurels. She divides her focus between live performances throughout continental Europe and beyond while maintaining an increasingly busy recording agenda. 2020 saw the release of her latest recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, a performance of Beethoven’s piano Concertos №1 & 2, and her most recent project is the aforementioned Singing the Nocturnes.
Her performance of Chopin’s famed Nocturnes solidifies her standing as a musical artist of true dimension. It is an outstanding work that earned Sombart fulsome praise from every quarter and illustrates her continued allegiance to self-expression. Rarely is an artist as complete as this and we are fortunate to have her alive in such a tumultuous period. Elizabeth Sombart is at the peak of her powers right now and even greater accomplishments lay ahead.
Colin Jordan
