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In the early ’90s, at various memorial expert services for buddies who experienced died of AIDS, I played “Good Detail Going,” a wistful music about recalling imperfect but cherished relationships. “Marry Me a Tiny,” slash from the primary production of “Company” but beloved in afterwards revivals as the protagonist’s assertion of resolve and despair, was a different piece I relished carrying out I still use the demanding perpetual-movement piano aspect as an workout to preserve my finger system limber.
In 2010, I made an 80th birthday tribute video to him for the Times web site, in which, amid other excerpts, I played and analyzed the wondrous chords at the start off of “Sunday in the Park with George.” Below, the hero, Georges Seurat, talking to the viewers, clarifies the things of portray, how the artist must carry “order to the whole” by design and style, composition, balance, light — and, lastly, harmony. Each individual word is accompanied, virtually musically illustrated, by a variant of a five-notice arpeggio figure that uncannily embodies each thought. The chord for light is so piercing and brilliant you practically want to squint.
In 2016, I posed to Sondheim the problem of why this sort of a master composer so seldom wrote a purely instrumental perform. Of course, he was just one of the best lyricists in the background of musical theater. But wasn’t he tempted to put phrases apart now and then, and just compose, say, a piano sonata?
He answered that it wasn’t seriously the words that produced his musical strategies. “I convey the character,” he stated. “Let’s see what occurs to him. I categorical it musically.” He was endlessly fascinated by the “puzzle of new music,” he added. But when he receives only into songs, the “puzzle can take over.”
I’ve been thinking considering that his death about a excursion to the Bronx Zoo my husband and I took in the spring of 2019 with Sondheim and his husband, Jeff Romley. They have been passionate animal enthusiasts, and my cousin Kathleen LaMattina is effective there with her husband, Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director. In a specific home, these honored guests could pet sloths and penguins, and even get close to a cheetah, beneath a workers member’s tranquil handle. I have images of Sondheim feeding leafy tree branches to a giraffe.
I’m wanting as I compose this at the piano-vocal rating to “Sweeney Todd” Sondheim signed for me the first time he came to evening meal, in 1997.
