MELISSA ERRICO’S FAVORITE SONDHEIM LYRIC (On this 90th birthday week of the great composer)
Dear Sandi’s readers,
Hope you’re doing okay at this crazy time.
Sondheim’s birthday is coming up & with more time at home, we can celebrate by thinking what our favorite twisted, brilliant, illuminating, contradictory, healing lyrics are. In these ambivalent times, it won’t be hard to find strong & bittersweet lines!
Only last week, I made this video at home for a celebration article in the NYT for Sondheim’s birthday, isolating my favorite of his lyrics. Instead, they posted a full performance and their piece was just great.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/theater/favorite-sondheim-songs.html
So, for Sandi’s awesome readers, at her request, please enjoy the link to my home made tape they didn’t end up using!
Melissa Errico – Stephen Sondheim
My thoughts on it are:
NO MORE–it’s a late in the show number in the show “Into The Woods” It’s a big Sondheim … what I think of as a real sublime philosophical song, it’s classic “Sondheim Sublime”… in that it takes on a huge subject. I made a whole album last year around what I called the big philosophical, cosmic songs.
It asks: Why are we alive, what do we leave for our kids, we leave a mess, we die and we don’t, it’s one of those songs where you just shudder at the scale of the emotions and ideas that Sondheim has taken on… and it draws on almost my operatic capacities as a singer to do it justice… but it’s exactly where the intellectual challenge is so enormous… it’s another form of sublime, not just the mysterious universality of something but the sheer scale of the mountain you have to climb …. because its not about How Are Things in Glocca Morra? – it’s about why are we here on this planet to suffer and die in the first place?
And it’s an example of exactly what I mean by sublime. There is some mysterious power in the song that Stephen Sondheim has put into it that enables it to speak to a universal emotion even while it explores an insanely particular situation.
For more about my ideas, visit these films I made for my cd: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rn85bvYn66M#
All of the films I made are at: http://sondheimsublime.com/phone/sixty-second-sondheim.html#anchor-u28408
Want to nerd out about what “sublime” has meant historically? https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/art-and-sublime
Hope you’ll enjoy! Happy Birthday Mr Sondheim!
