"Live from Lincoln Center:" New York Philharmonic Tribute to Stephen Sondheim (New York Philharmonic, WNET, PBS, originally aired December 31, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the Lifetime movie and taking a half-hour break because the local PBS station was showing a 90-minute episode of All Creatures Great and Small (actually an hour-long episode stretched out via those god-awful pledge breaks – as I’ve said before, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich advocated zeroing ont PBS’s funding by saying those pledge breaks were worse than ordinary commercials, he had a point – and even more when PBS started selling corporate donors what they called “enhanced underwriting opportunities,” i.e. commercials, and often the same commercials these companies ran on for-profit stations), I got to see a quite remarkable concert video showcasing the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s 2019 concert (i.e., three months before COVID-19 changed the world) on Stephen Sondheim.

When I saw their previous New Year’s concert celebrating the musical legacy of Marvin Hamlisch in 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-york-philharmonic-new-years-eve.html) and wondered why they hadn’t done Sondheim instead. Well, praise be, they not only had done Sondheim, they had done him while Sondheim was still alive (he didn’t die until November 26, 2021, at the age of 91) even though the legendarily introverted Sondheim didn’t show up for the concert. The performances included mostly overtures and so-called “orchestral suites” from Sondheim’s works, including the 1962 musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (the first time Sondheim wrote the music, not just the words, to a show, duplicating Frank Loesser’s similar transition from librettist to composer) which opened the concert. The Forum music was arranged by Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin, who had done similar work for West Side Story (1957), with lyrics by Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein.

Then host Bernadette Peters, who boasted that she’d been in Broadway productions of five Sondheim musicals, did a snatch of the big song from one of them – the Witch’s song from Into the Woods – before yielding the stage to the Philharmonic, who under the baton of Alexander Gemignani (son of Paul Gemignani, who frequently conducted Sondheim’s scores on Broadway; Paul is still alive and reportedly gave his son lessons on how this music should go) performed an orchestral suite from Into the Woods. This time the suite was arranged by one of the names I love to hate, Don Sebesky, who in the 1960’s and 1970’s was often called upon to arrange sappy orchestral backgrounds for major jazz musicians like guitarist Wes Montgomery. Sebesky’s work here was unexceptional but acceptable – he showcased the original tunes well, which is what this type of arrangement is supposed to do. Afterwards came another orchestral suite, this time from a much-maligned Sondheim show, Assassins, a musical depiction of both successful and would-be Presidential assassins that got a lot of hissy-fit comments from reviewers. This was arranged by Michael Starobin, who had also orchestrated the original songs for Broadway, and he did a good job with the deliberately old-timey feel of the music, including incorporating a solo banjo.

Then came a song written for the original production of Sondheim’s piece Company, “Multiples of Amy’s” (I’m guessing at the punctuation), which was deleted (along with another song Sondheim wrote for that spot in the show) and replaced with the familiar “Being Alive.” (For a quite good performance of “Being Alive” without the added clutter of the show’s spoken dialogue, check our Chris Colfer’s version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lbfzzjybU.) I’d rather have heard the song with Sondheim’s original lyrics – that would have given us a better point of comparison with the song that replaced it, if nothing else – except for the terrible singer they got as the show’s guest star (more on her later). The next items on the program were an orchestral suite from Sweeney Todd (also arranged by Don Sebesky) and an instrumental piece called “Night Waltz” from A Little Night Music (done by the show’s original arranger, Jonathan Tunick). The Sweeney Todd suite was well done and showcased the principal songs (“Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” “Not While I’m Around” and the patter song “A Little Priest”) and the waltz was really lovely, half a traditional waltz that might have been composed by Johann Strauss, Jr. and half the twists put that style through by Richard Strauss (no relation) in his Vienna-set opera Der Rosenkavalier.

Then the orchestra played three songs from one of Sondheim’s most difficult and enigmatic musicals, Follies – a reunion of old cast members of the Weissmann Follies just before the theatre they performed in is about to be demolished and turned into a parking lot. One was the overture done by the orchestra alone, and the other two were songs sung by the concert’s guest vocalist, Katrina Lenk. She has an imposing list of credits on her Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Lenk – including a stint in a revival of Sondheim’s Company in which she played a gender-reassigned version of the male central lead (it was a victim of the COVID-19 lockdown but went back into previews in November 2021) – but I didn’t like her. The songs she sang from Follies were “Losing My Mind” and “Could I Leave You?” – the latter an exercise in Sondheim’s lack of sentimentality: the singer, a woman who has married a rich man, ponders how much she could to soak him for if she divorced him, and her final couplet is, “Could I leave you? Yes. Would I leave you? Guess.”

But Lenk totally misphrased and misunderstood the songs: “Losing My Mind,” which should be sung in almost hushed tones, got the full Broadway-belt treatment, and “Could I Leave You?” totally missed the irony in Sondheim’s lyric and just made the woman sound mean. Besides, though Lenk was born in the U.S. (in Chicago, though she doesn’t say when), her Eastern European accent was very noticeable both in the overall timbre of the voice and in her phrasing. Though she has more of a conventional voice than Nico, I couldn’t help but think, “If Nico had made a standards album, this is what it would have sounded like,” just as the 1964 record Lionel Hampton made with Japanese singer Miyoko Hoshino had me thinking, “If Yoko Ono had made a standards album, this is what it would have sounded like.”

After the near-disaster of Katrina Lenk’s performances the concert returned to “orchestral suite” territory with an arrangement of the songs from the show I consider Sondheim’s masterpiece, Sunday in the Park with George (a statement about art and life whose first act was a dramatization of the real-life French pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s creation of his most famous painting, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” and whose second act is about a modern multi-media artist who learns he is Seurat’s great-grandson). I’ve loved the show since I watched the original PBS production of it with the original leads, Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, and when I showed it to my late partner John Gabrish he not only loved it, too, he mentioned seeing the original painting in the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. Once again the original arranger, Michael Starobin, did the suite, and he did an excellent job, including the effect Sondheim created of having little bursts of staccato notes to simulate the style of Seurat’s paintings.

After that there was an encore – the overture to Merrily We Roll Along, a show based on a play by George S. Kaufman from 1934 which told the story of a love relationship backwards, starting with the couple already broken up and ending with them in the first throes of love. It hadn’t been a hit for Kaufman and his collaborator, Moss Hart, in 1934 and it wasn’t a hit for Sondheim and his book writer, George Furth, in 1981 either. The overture was a fun piece, at least, but the Sunday in the Park with George suite was really the right way to end the show. It is Sondheim’s deepest and richest score, witn a minimum of comic-relief songs showing how clever he was and a maximum of raw emotion and power – and though the PBS telecast with the original leads is the definitive statement of this show, the orchestral arrangement did justice to it and celebrated the lyrical beauties (not words often associated with Stephen Sondheim) of its melodies.