The recording studio can have quite the impact on an artist’s sound, and more often than not what we hear in a conventional piece is a lot different from what we would expect out of a live performance – save for the work that Elizabeth Sombart is doing right now. Sombart wants to draw us into a vivid world of her creation with her album Singing the Nocturnes, and while hype surrounding this LP has been more than a little significant, this is a rare case of the product living up to its billing in almost every department.
Sombart lusts after the melodies in Singing the Nocturnes, and I think hers is a rather good example of what happens when an artist sticks to their skillset rather than presenting something overly ambitious right out of the gate. Throughout the whole of this tracklist, it feels like we’re building up to something powerful as opposed to getting everything this player can throw at us at once, which is partly why I think so many listeners who wouldn’t normally be captivated by the classical genre have been falling in love with what they hear in this album.
A lot of people have talked about the self-control Elizabeth Sombart has had over the years, and it’s easy to see why when examining any of the gilded entries in Singing the Nocturnes.
There’s a balance that’s won over not through compositional depth but a division of complicated narratives and streamlined melodies, the best of which sting with more emotionality than any verse ever could, and it was important to this artist that we focus on the duality of the music as much as we did her spirited execution from one track to the next (no matter the record we’re talking about).
I will definitely say that while there has been a real problem with over-ambitiousness throughout the underground in the past couple of years, Sombart seems like one of the few voices of reason when she’s in the studio here, developing structures and elements of melodicism from within the context of a Chopin performance – which is no easy task when you think about it. She knows what she can do and the ways she can do it better than anybody else she’s competing with at the moment, and this contributes a lot towards her overall charisma no matter where we look and listen in Singing the Nocturnes.
It feels like Elizabeth Sombart has been dropping one spellbinding work after another over the last few years, and for an artist who has been in the public sphere for over twenty-five years, she sounds as involved with her craft as she ever has when listening to her most recent studio album. This hasn’t been the most profound year for the underground in Europe or North America for that matter, but all in all, I would be lying if I said that Singing the Nocturnes wasn’t one of the more intriguing and provocative pieces to debut in the last twelve months.
Jodi Marxbury