You won’t have to dig too deeply into this blog (or any of my other public-facing work) to know that Stephen Sondheim is easily my favorite American composer of the latter-20th century and a major influence on my own work.
Thankfully, my co-hosts on The Classical Gabfest were willing to let me have this week’s episode to myself. In lieu of our normal roundtable discussion, I created an audio documentary devoted to Sondheim’s work as a composer.
It’s hardly surprising that the discourse around Sondheim in the past two weeks has been heavy on his lyrics and light on his music; music is just harder to talk about, especially without resorting to non-technical terminology. (Sondheim even said as much in his two-volume book of lyrics.)
But with an audio medium, the job becomes (slightly) more feasible. I put a lot of myself into this podcast, and I hope it brings classical music lovers closer to Sondheim and Sondheim lovers closer to classical music.