Sondheim

The acclaimed Opus Two violin-piano duo presents new arrangements of musical highlights from Stephen Sondheim's brilliant Broadway shows.

The acclaimed Opus Two violin-piano duo presents new arrangements of musical highlights from Stephen Sondheim's brilliant Broadway shows.

Anthony de Mare's choice of pioneering new music for piano typically pays off with critical appreciation for his performances and recordings. On this album he's pays tribute to Stephen Sondheim in a fascinating project. De Mare invited composers from a broad variety of genres from Sondheims own world of musical theater to jazz, classical, pop, film and beyond to re-imagine a Sondheim song of their choice as a solo piano piece.

Stephen Sondheim's musical, inspired by the life and work of the French pointillist (or, as he preferred to be known, chromo-luminarist) painter Georges Seurat (1859-1991), is one of his most beguiling and challenging works, but one that won't necessarily appeal to every taste. The music is, on one level, an homage to Seurat's most celebrated painting, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," and could easily be the finest dramatization of a work of art and the life of an artist this side of Alexander Korda's film Rembrandt. But this is also a sweet, sad, profound, and ultimately elevating meditation on life and the creative process. Sunday in the Park with George moves with lightning swiftness between brittle passages, many centered on frustration, and soaring, achingly beautiful sections. It engages in a fair amount of wry comedy in the process, mostly at the expense of its characters, and, more importantly, the worlds of modern art, multimedia art, and new age music, among other '80s cultural fixtures.