In 2007, the French pianist Rebecca Chaillot recorded several works by Liszt on Bechstein, including the Sonata in B minor. Rebecca Chaillot started playing the piano at the age of four and performed works by Haydn on stage when she was seven years old. She holds degrees from the music conservatories of Montpellier and Geneva, and from Indiana University at Bloomington. She has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the West Indies and the Americas, and was artistic director of the Pro Musica festival. Rebecca Chaillot has inspired several composers, including Emile Naoumoff, who dedicated the passacaglia of his piano sonata to her. She toured the Indian Ocean as a chamber musician together with the cellist Alain Meunier as part of a humanitarian project. She also performed at Geneva's Victoria Hall during a charity concert that she organized to benefit Bolivian children. In 2008, she chose a C. Bechstein concert grand piano to record a live CD with various works by Franz Liszt, including the Sonata in B minor.
Rebecca Chaillot
Rebecca Chaillot plays works by Liszt
Franz Liszt may have had a closer relationship to pianos made by Carl Bechstein than any other composer: Hans von Büllow, one of the master’s pupils, premiered the Sonata in B Minor on a Bechstein in Berlin on 22 January 1857, while Liszt himself played almost exclusively on instruments of this brand throughout the last eighteen years of his life.Thus, it is not surprising that Rebecca Chaillot also chose a C. Bechstein concert grand piano for recording four works by the great composer: Ballade No. 2, Rêve d’amour, Sonata in B Minor and Campanella (Liszt/Busoni version). This CD, released on the L’heure bleue label, was recorded in November 2007 at the concert hall in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
