Stephen Sondheim/Eric Stern: Chamber Music—arrangements from A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Follies, Evening Primrose, Stavisky, Company, Sunday in the Park with George, and Merrily We Roll Along. Opus Two (William Terwilliger, violin; Andrew Cooperstock, piano); Elena Shaddow, soprano; Andrew Garland, baritone; Beth Vanderborgh, cello. Bridge Records. $16.99.
Music for Vocal Quartet by William Byrd, Ivan Moody, John Tavener, Becky McGlade, Akemi Naito, Paul Moravec, Andrew Smith, Nico Muhly, and Orlando Gibbons. New York Polyphony (Geoffrey Williams, countertenor; Steven Caldicott Wilson and Andrew Fuchs, tenors; Craig Phillips, bass); LeStrange Viols (John Mark Rozendaal, Loren Ludwig, Douglas Kelley, Zoe Weiss, Kivie Cahn-Lipman). BIS. $21.99 (SACD).
It is not difficult to identify Eric Stern’s source of inspiration for the music on a new Bridge Records CD – or half of that inspiration, anyway. The material clearly comes from the works, including Broadway shows and one film, of Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021). But that is only half of what lies behind the recording. The other half comes from William Terwilliger and Andrew Cooperstock, who style themselves Opus Two and are commissioning a series of arrangements of Broadway music – of which this is the third. Stern (born 1952) is a first-rate choice for this hybrid of popular theatrical and classical chamber music: he is an experienced arranger who actually worked with Sondheim on several shows and even had the chance to discuss with him the Suite from “A Little Night Music” that opens this recording. That suite, for violin and piano, comes across in this arrangement with its devilish charm nicely displayed and even accentuated through a violin part whose eeriness somewhat echoes that of the solo violin in the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. Terwilliger and Cooperstock set the tone for the entire disc with this suite, taking the music very seriously and bringing to the fore Sondheim’s characteristic melodic individuality along with his ability to hint at devilish doings through music that practically oozes irony. That is especially true in Sweeney Todd, a suite from which – called Fleet Street Suite – provides the other bookend for this CD, and comes across with just the right mixture of overt levity and underlying grotesquerie. Between these two more-extended works are eight shorter ones, in all of which Stern shows a sensitivity to Sondheim’s musical world and an ability to distill the essence of individual elements of various works to very good effect. In addition to the suites, Sweeney Todd is represented by a violin-and-piano arrangement of Not While I’m Around; and A Little Night Music gets a treatment of Every Day a Little Death for violin, cello and piano. The way Stern varies the instrumentation, and includes vocal elements in a few cases, helps underline the differences among Sondheim’s scores, although pretty much all the music here is recognizable as to its source. Violin-and-piano arrangements are offered of Broadway Baby from Follies and the main title from the film Stavisky. There is a solo-violin version of Sorry-Grateful from Company, from which Terwilliger extracts considerable emotion, and a solo-piano arrangement of Now You Know from Merrily We Roll Along that Cooperstock plays with plenty of bounce. As for the vocal works, Elena Shaddow sings I Remember from Evening Primrose stylishly, and Andrew Garland does a good job with the rhythmic challenges of Finishing the Hat from Sunday in the Park with George. In both the voice-violin-piano arrangements, though, there is a greater sense of something missing than in the purely instrumental pieces: somehow the presence of voices draws attention to the spare accompaniment in a way that is not felt in the works that have been fully reduced to non-vocal chamber-music proportions. Well-played and pleasantly presented, the CD will bring considerable enjoyment to listeners already familiar with Sondheim’s music in general and with these specific pieces in particular. The disc is not a very good introduction to Sondheim, but more a matter of providing audiences already familiar with his music with an alternative way to experience a modest selection of works they already know and enjoy.
If the performers are themselves a partial inspiration for the Sondheim-focused CD, they are essentially the entire reason for being of a new BIS recording of vocal music composed over a period of nearly five centuries. The four-male-voice group known as New York Polyphony, which will soon mark its 20th anniversary, sees this disc as a way to revisit highlights of its two-decade journey, mixing works it has performed over the years with newly commissioned ones that the group’s members consider complementary to those they previously performed and recorded. There is a degree of navel-gazing to the concept, and certainly this rather rarefied CD is most likely to appeal to listeners who already know this specific ensemble and appreciate its musical approach and performance techniques. That does not, however, mean that the music heard here is unworthy – only that in its combinatorial aspects, it reflects the singers’ specific predilections and history and does not have any inherent cohesiveness of its own. The first and last pieces on the CD, which is to say the ones that bracket the overall presentation, are two of the disc’s three oldest, both dating to the early 17th century. The recording opens with Ecce quam bonum (1605) from the first book of Gradualia by William Byrd (1540-1623), and closes with The Silver Swan (1612) by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625); and in both cases, the sensitive vocal balance and careful phraseology of the singing lead to moving and elegant performances that fully convey the words’ meaning. The third work from long ago is another by Byrd, the Agnus Dei from his Mass for Four Voices (1592-1593), and here as in the Gibbons song, New York Polyphony is complemented by the ensemble called LeStrange Viols, which effectively and unobtrusively underlines the vocal material. The viol group is also heard in the penultimate and longest work on the CD, My Days (2012) by Nico Muhly (born 1981). This piece is about Gibbons – his work, his death, his autopsy – and although it is somewhat overdone and overextended, it gives the singers plenty of opportunities to hold forth both as individual voices and as a group in music whose contemporary harmonies do their best to be at the service of four-centuries-old sensibilities. All the remaining works here are from the 20th century or the 21st, but not all are insistent on sounding up-to-date. Canticum Canticorum I (1985) by priest and theologian Ivan Moody (1964-2024) is a three-movement setting, in Latin, of portions of the Biblical Song of Songs, and its simplicity and forthrightness echo the feelings and approaches of a much earlier time – to very good effect. The Lamb (1982) by John Tavener (1944-2013) beautifully sets William Blake’s familiar poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the simple harmonies of the vocal line neatly encompassing the focused naiveté of Blake’s poetry. The sources, poetic or scriptural, are varied in the remaining works on this disc. Of the Father’s Love Begotten (2021) by Becky McGlade (born 1974) uses words by Prudentius (348-ca. 413), and is followed here by Tsuki no Waka (2019) by Akemi Naito (born 1956), which uses a poem from Buddhist priest and poet Saigyō (1118-1190). It is through juxtapositions such as this, Christian and Buddhist, ancient and more ancient – and through contemporary music written within a short period of time but approaching its vocal communication in differing ways – that the entire disc proceeds. Naito’s work is followed by two written by Paul Moravec (born 1957): The Last Invocation (2020) and Darest Thou Now, O Soul (2023) – both using poetry of Walt Whitman in a way that bridges the sacred and the secular. The most-recent piece on the CD is Katarsis (2024) by Andrew Smith (born 1970). It is a setting of the Old Testament Lamentations of Jeremiah, in which the full flavor of the combined voices of the members of New York Polyphony comes through with heightened effectiveness. Although this disc will scarcely have universal appeal, it will be a must-have for audiences already familiar with and enamored of New York Polyphony’s musicality and the group’s determined efforts to juxtapose vocal works hundreds of years old with analogous ones created in very recent times, and in some cases composed specifically for this very polished group of singers.
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