Elizabeth Sombart, RPO, Pierre Vallet - The Art of Chopin: The Piano Concertos (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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Elizabeth Sombart, RPO, Pierre Vallet - The Art of Chopin: The Piano Concertos (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

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Elizabeth Sombart, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Pierre Vallet - The Art of Chopin: The Piano Concertos (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time - 77:18 minutes | 1,33 GB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Digital booklet

Chopin created a radically new musical language for the piano that was nevertheless strongly influenced by his love of the contemporary folk music from his native country that he was exiled from for the greater part of his creative life, Poland. The unique flavour of his expression was intimately connected to the longing he felt for a world that was vastly different in make-up and feeling from anywhere today, but the power and appeal of his compositions have long outlasted the demise of their environmental origins.

However, for the pianist and pedagogue Elizabeth Sombart, the founder of the specialised center Centre International d’Etude de la Pédagogie Résonnance (CIEPR) organised by the Fondation Résonnance, this very survival of Chopin and his particular popularity today presents a great challenge for the performer who lives in such a dissimilar ambience from the far more intimate atmosphere that Chopin evoked. Whereas of course the worlds of all the great 19th Century composers were completely different from life as it is today, for Madame Sombart the changed situation brings especially critical issues for the understanding and interpretation of Chopin’s music. The music of Chopin has been a lifelong preoccupation for Elizabeth Sombart not only as a performer but also as a pedagogue, and indeed the methodical and phenomenological teaching of piano style and technique in the works of a very wide range of composers has been a major part of her life for many years. She established the internationally operating Fondation Résonnance to give students not just a rigorous technical education but also a deep understanding of the broad-ranging expressive potential of the piano.

Especially in the case of Chopin’s music, for Elizabeth Sombart this means instilling a profound awareness of spatial and ephemeral elements – characteristics that she feels are particularly elusive to sense and realise in today’s world. As she points out, even the most meticulous application of processes aligning thought and feeling cannot guarantee the strangely evanescent magic that is so centrally inherent in the music of Chopin but is often so unattainable in performance. Environmental conditions, always a crucial factor in any artistic recreation, are maybe even more critical for the performance of Chopin’s oeuvre than most other composers’ in this respect, and that is a fundamental reason why Elizabeth Sombart has waited so long in her distinguished career before feeling able to make studio recordings of Chopin’s two Piano Concertos. For several decades Elizabeth Sombart has been specially admired by connoisseurs as a highly idiomatic interpreter of the challengingly demanding music of Chopin, but only now has she found the ideal conditions to conjure up the composer’s ephemeral, almost dream like world while playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the literal environment of Abbey Road studios. Those conditions have materialised through discovering the conductor Pierre Vallet and the RPO who have been ideal partners in her task, achieving the precarious balance of fleeting freedom and faultless precision that Chopin’s music requires.