Liaisons - Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano

Anthony de Mare

EN / DE
US concert pianist Anthony de Mare pays tribute to musical theatre composer Stephen Sondheim in a fascinating project. De Mare invited contemporary composers from a broad variety of genres – from jazz to classical to film music – to “re-imagine” a Sondheim song as a piece for solo piano. Contributing re-composers included Steve Reich, Wynton Marsalis, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Fred Hersch, Ethan Iverson, William Bolcom, Frederic Rzewski, Nils Vigeland, Gabriel Kahane, Thomas Newman, Jake Heggie and more – in total, 36 composers from seven countries. “Each of the composers is having a conversation with Mr. Sondheim,” Anthony de Mare told the New York Times, “with his material but also his influence, his musical wit and his craft.” Sondheim’s response? “To hear composers take my work and take it seriously … it’s a thrill.”
In diesem faszinierenden Projekt zollt der amerikanische Konzertpianist Anthony de Mare dem Musicalkomponisten Stephen Sondheim Tribut. De Mare lud einen ausgewählten Kreis zeitgenössischer Komponisten ein – von Jazz über Klassik bis hin zur Filmmusik –, einen Song von Sondheim als Stück für Solo-Klavier neu zu komponieren. Unter den insgesamt 36 mitwirkenden Komponisten aus insgesamt sieben Nationen befinden sich Namen wie Steve Reich, Wynton Marsalis, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Fred Hersch, Ethan Iverson, William Bolcom, Frederic Rzewski, Nils Vigeland, Gabriel Kahane, Thomas Newman und Jake Heggie. Der New York Times sagte Anthony de Mare: „Jeder einzelne Komponist tritt in einen Dialog mit Herrn Sondheim […] durch sein Material, seine Einflüsse, seinen musikalischen Witz und seine Kunstfertigkeit.“ Sondheims Reaktion? „Dass Komponisten mein Werk aufgreifen und es ernst nehmen … ist schlichtweg hinreißend!
Featured Artists Recorded

2010-2014

Original Release Date

02.10.2015

  • CD 1
  • 1A Little Night Fughetta
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    01:41
  • 2Color and Light
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:36
  • 3Finishing the Hat - 2 Pianos
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:20
  • 4The Ladies Who Lunch
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    07:19
  • 5Perpetual Happiness
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    06:01
  • 6Birds of Victorian England
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:04
  • 7Johanna in Space
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:56
  • 8You Could Drive A Person Crazy
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:01
  • 9That Old Piano Roll
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:38
  • 10Sorry/Grateful
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    06:59
  • 11No One Is Alone
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:03
  • 12A Bowler Hat
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:17
  • 13I'm Excited. No You're Not.
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:15
  • CD 2
  • 1The Demon Barber
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:07
  • 2Send in the Clowns
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:49
  • 3The Worst [Empanadas] in London
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:53
  • 4I Think About You
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    09:00
  • 5Very Put Together
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:08
  • 6I'm Still Here
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    06:43
  • 7Love is in the Air
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:05
  • 8Epiphany
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:05
  • 9Pretty Women
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:44
  • 10Paraphrase (Someone in a Tree)
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:42
  • 11In and Out of Love
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:59
  • 12Another Hundred People
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    07:17
  • CD 3
  • 1Into the Woods
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    08:57
  • 2Every Day A Little Death
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:18
  • 3Merrily We Roll Along
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:39
  • 4Notes on 'Beautiful'
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:27
  • 5Being Alive
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:45
  • 6Not While I'm Around
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    02:55
  • 7The Ballad of Guiteau
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:53
  • 8Now
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    03:22
  • 9A Child of Children and Art
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    08:24
  • 10going... gone
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    07:38
  • 11Everybody's Got The Right
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    04:36
  • 12Sunday in the Park - Passages (encore)
    (Stephen Sondheim)
    05:20
Looking for something just about completely different? Here it is. It's not totally completely different, because it's yet another set devoted to that old fave Stephen Sondheim. The completely different aspect is that for once it's not the man's lyrics getting the close scrutiny. It's his melodies. Concert pianist Anthony de Mare asked a goodly number of contemporary composers to ‘re-imagine’ a Sondheim tune.
David Finkle, Village Voice
 
‘Liaisons’ is the wonderfully apt title given by pianist Anthony de Mare to his commissioning project, which brings together three dozen composers – a starry who’s-who of the contemporary music world – and the glittering, refined music-theater score of Stephen Sondheim […] It’s thrilling to hear just how much material there is in a Sondheim creation for another composer to seize on, whether a single melodic detail or a full-size harmonic conception, and to witness the directions those ideas can be taken […] The whole undertaking is a triumph.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
 
What a good idea this was. To wit, what if a pianist sometimes called ‘an evangelist of new music’ commissioned contemporary composers to ‘re-imagine’ Stephen Sondheim’s songs as contemporary music for the piano? […] almost all ‘fantasias’ are fascinating. A terrific project.
Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
 
An interesting project that took four years to complete; pianist Anthony de Mare decided to give tribute to Stephen Sondheim’s compositions, but to add into the mix he asked 3 dozen composers (ranging from classical to jazz to theatre and back) to personally arrange, or ‘interpret’ a creative way of performing each piece. […] The result is a voluminous trip to the piano keys that demonstrates how the piano is, indeed, an orchestra in itself.
George W. Harris, Jazz Weekly
 
Sometimes things that look that good on paper don't actually work in reality. But ‘Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano’ is not just a standout release for the label, the pianist and all the artists commissioned to contribute arrangements—including Wynton Marsalis, Fred Hersch, The Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Steve Reich, Annie Gosfield, Eric Rockwell, Jason Robert Brown, Duncan Sheik, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Kenji Bunch, Mason Bates, Frederic Rzewski, John Musto, David Shire and 21 more—it's a recording that should turn out to be another true landmark for a label that scoffs at anything that smacks of convention and constantly encourages cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, cross-stylistic excursions: another ‘Officium’; another ‘Tabula Rasa’; another ‘Siwan’; another ‘Köln Concert’. […] If there's a single word that defines Liaisons, it's this: surprise. Given de Mare's muscular virtuosity—balanced by an attention to dynamics that allows him to, indeed, render 88 keys as an entire orchestra—it's his ability to work with the 36 pieces where, as Sondheim describes it, ‘very few ... are built like a song. They're much more free-floating, there's much more of a fantasia about them.’
John Kelman, All About Jazz
Pianist Anthony de Mare invited 36 composers from a wide variety of backgrounds – contemporary classical music, jazz, pop, film music, musical theatre, and more – to ‘re-imagine’ a song of their choice by Stephen Sondheim as a solo piano piece. Recording sessions for this 3-CD set spanned a four-year period, from November 2010 to November 2014. The result is a remarkable compendium of new music as well as a testament to the depth of the source material.
 
Sondheim is more than America’s preeminent composer of musical theatre, and his influence has resonated far beyond Broadway. “I created this project,” says Anthony De Mare, “because I wanted to show Sondheim’s influence on composers of many different genres and I also wanted to enhance and add to the piano repertoire with a whole new body of work. This project breaks open the boundaries between musical theatre and concert music.” As liner note author, and Sondheim authority Mark Eden Horowitz points out, Liaisons is “an exploration of how music communicates, not just to an audience, but among composers.”
 
“When Tony first told me about his idea for Liaisons I was flattered and intrigued,” says Stephen Sondheim. “Over the years I’ve heard songs of mine harmonized differently, and I’ve also heard arrangers change one note and completely kill the harmony. But the pieces created for Liaisons are by serious composers, not arrangers. Some are new to me, and some are old friends, some I was familiar with musically but had never met them personally. Nearly all of them totally surprised me, taking approaches that would never have occurred to me - very few of these re-imaginings are built like a song. They’re much more free-floating, there’s much more of a fantasia about them… It’s been fascinating to hear what each composer has done.”
 
The Sondheim songs reimagined, rearranged and reinvented, taking the idea of theme and variations to another level, are drawn from the shows A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday In The Park With George (1984), Into The Woods (1987), Assassins (1991), and Passion (1994).  It’s remarkable to hear the way in which the commissioned composers can explore Sondheim’s world while strongly retaining their own signatures. Steve Reich’s version of “Finishing The Hat” from Sunday in The Park is one good example amongst many. Sondheim’s melody resonates clearly but the pulsing rhythmic modulations make the piece thoroughly Reichian. Wynton Marsalis and Frederic Rzewski might represent very different points of the musical spectrum but both find inspiration in Sondheim’s Follies. Marsalis pays tribute to James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington in a version of “That Old Piano Roll” that vibrates with jazz history, while Frederic Rzewski – who once called Sondheim “the Schoenberg of musical theatre” – interprets “I’m Still Here” as a pensive meditation. There are many discoveries to be made here.
 
As Mark Eden Horowitz points out, “one of the reasons Liaisons succeeds so brilliantly is because Sondhein’s own music is such a rich source for sounds, ideas and approaches. (…) A Sondheim show may take place in 19th century Japan, London, Paris or Italy, Sweden at the turn of the 20th century, 1970s New York, once upon a time in a fairy tale wood, or any number of other times and places....”
 
A major figure in the history of the musical, also through his collaborations with Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and more, Sondheim has described himself as an “experimental writer”, and his tunes have subtly challenged conventions of form and style and structure. Serial and electronic music composer Milton Babbit was amongst Sondheim’s early teachers, not an obvious mentor for a show business career. Sondheim: “I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery”. Sondheim incorporated Asian musical influences in his mid-70s score for Pacific Overtures, making thereby his own bridges to the emergent Minimalist school (Phil Kline picks up on this in “Paraphrase”, his arrangement of “Someone In A Tree”). Indeed Stephen Sondheim has created - as Mark Eden Horowitz has noted in his book Sondheim on Music - a discrete musical language and vocabulary for each of his musicals. Part of the pleasure of Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano lies in hearing the 36 composers engage with these languages in their own idiosyncratic ways. Anthony De Mare delivers a tour de force with his presentation of these diverse musical conversations with Sondheim.
 
Anthony De Mare, born in Rochester, New York, is a renowned champion of contemporary music. He pioneered the genre of the speaking-singing pianist nearly 25 years ago with the premiere of Frederic Rzewski’s De Profundis, and his versatility has inspired the creation of over 60 new works by composers including Meredith Monk, David del Tredici, Paul Moravec, Aaron Jay Kernis, Fred Hersch and Jerome Kitzke. With Liaisons he has added another 27 composers to the list of those he has commissioned, and another 36 compositions to the contemporary piano repertoire – plus his own arrangement “Sunday In The Park –Passages” which brings the Liaisons three-CD set to its conclusion.
 
He has performed Liaisons programs across the U.S., Canada and Cuba including major venues and festivals in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis among others. Upcoming performances include Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA where a selection of the Re-Imaginings will be played on September 18. In New York, all 36 pieces will be played in three different venues: Birdland (September 24), The Sheen Center (October 22) and Symphony Space (November 19).  The adaptability of the programme to both “jazz” and “classical” spaces speaks once again to the range of Stephen Sondheim’s musical imagination and to De Mare’s versatility as performer.
 
Liaisons, produced by Judith Sherman, was recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and Greenfield Recital Hall, Manhattan School of Music.