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    The EGOT Winner Behind Sondheim’s Signature Sound

    To understand the role of the Broadway orchestrator, seek out the composer Stephen Sondheim’s piano demo for the song “Losing My Mind” from the musical “Follies” and then compare it to the version on the original cast recording. The demo’s tone is wistful and resigned, with a touch of the whiskey bar about it. In the finished version, the song sounds transformed: Ascending notes on the strings, interjections from the brass and crashing cymbals build to a powerful climax, evoking the heartache and inner turmoil contained in the lyric.What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick.“I seem to have a nose for the theater, and it’s really like that,” Tunick, the prolific Broadway orchestrator, said during an interview in his book-lined study on the Upper West Side. “If something works, you can almost smell it.”Sondheim himself called Tunick the “best orchestrator in the history of the theater” during a 2011 video interview with Sony Masterworks. His work can be heard in three very different Sondheim musicals on New York stages right now: “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.”In fact, Tunick, 85, has orchestrated nearly every Sondheim musical since 1970, including “Company,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Into the Woods” and “Passion.” For other composers, he orchestrated “A Chorus Line,” “Nine,” “The Color Purple” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” An EGOT winner (that rare recipient of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards), Tunick won a Tony for his “Titanic” orchestrations in 1997 (the first year the award was presented) and an Academy Award for the film version of “A Little Night Music.” Last fall he became the first orchestrator to have his portrait hung at Sardi’s.Sondheim and Tunick, in 2003, at the City Opera sitzprobe for the musical “A Little Night Music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the Sardi’s event, at least a couple of guests could be heard wondering aloud: What does a Broadway orchestrator actually do?Typically, for a Broadway show of the kind Tunick might orchestrate, the composer provides the vocal part along with some form of accompaniment. That accompaniment can be a basic chord sheet, a fully realized piano part or anything in between. It’s the orchestrator’s task — a long and lonely one, Tunick said — to turn that accompaniment into something an orchestra can perform.There are, of course, more poetic descriptions. In Steven Suskin’s book “The Sound of Broadway Music,” the original “Carousel” orchestrator, Don Walker, likened orchestration to “the clothing of a musical thought”; Hans Spialek, who orchestrated “On Your Toes” and numerous other Rodgers and Hart shows, compared it to “painting a musical picture.”Tunick’s preferred analogy is “lighting for the ears.” He often confers with a show’s lighting designer to determine which colors and shadings will be used onstage. The orchestra, he said, has the ability “to provide its own shadings of light, darkness, warmth and texture to the music and lyrics.”For the Broadway premiere of “Company” in 1970, Tunick fashioned a crisp, gleaming sound that was the aural equivalent of the chrome-and-glass set by Boris Aronson. Tunick conjured a hellacious soundscape for the macabre “Sweeney Todd”: agitated strings, blazing horns and frantic xylophones that evoke the scurrying of rats. For “Merrily We Roll Along,” he replicated the bold, brassy up-tempo sound of 1960s Broadway overtures.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff in the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTunick sees to it that the instruments never get in the way of the words. “He is always aware of the lyric and the dramatic moment,” said Joel Fram, the music director of the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” He pointed to that show’s “Our Time” as an example, with its twinkling piano, simple woodwind solos, gentle rhythmic figure on the bassoon and pizzicato cello — a suitable soundtrack for the youthful optimism of the show’s protagonists at that point. “It serves the song rather than overwhelms it.”Charlie Alterman pointed to a favorite orchestration in “Company,” for which he served as the music director of the recent national tour. “It’s a bubbling up of emotion somewhere inside the character of Bobby,” he said, referring to the moment in the final number, “Being Alive,” when, unexpectedly, the melody of “Someone Is Waiting” — an earlier song filled with a yearning for companionship — sneaks in like a dawning realization.“Deep down there’s something that remembers the feeling of ‘Someone Is Waiting’ and wants to be heard,” Alterman said. The choice is intriguing on an intellectual level, “but at a gut level, it does that incredible thing that good music does, where you can’t quite explain it in your mind, but it’s clear as day in your heart.”Tunick remembers sneaking those few notes into “Being Alive” — and that Sondheim was pleased with the addition. “At least it showed him that I was paying attention,” Tunick said.More than merely making the music sound pretty or palatable, a great orchestrator “is also a playwright, telling the story and reflecting character in orchestral sound,” said Michael Starobin, who orchestrated Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Assassins.”As the “Being Alive” example above demonstrates, orchestration “can hint at unspoken secrets,” Tunick said. “Things that the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”ONE PIECE OF MUSIC made a big impression on the young Jonathan Tunick: “Tubby the Tuba,” the 1945 children’s song, centers on a forlorn tuba who longs to play the melody instead of just the bass line. Much like “Peter and the Wolf,” the song highlighted the distinct characters of the individual instruments of the orchestra. “This idea penetrated my growing brain,” he said. “It developed into a lifelong obsession.”Tunick had some perfunctory piano lessons as a youngster growing up in New York — “I sailed through the Diller-Quaile book in a week” — but it was a clarinet, a gift from his amateur clarinetist uncle, that kept his interest.While a student at what is now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, he started his own band and played in the school orchestra as well as in the All City High School Orchestra. He started writing music, majoring in composition at Bard College, before paying his way through Juilliard by performing with the school’s orchestra.He was considerably more interested in what was happening at Birdland than on Broadway. “Musicals at the time were a little stodgy,” he said. “It was disposable popular entertainment. You’d throw it out like a used Kleenex. I was a little hipper than that.”While in college, a girlfriend introduced him to Frank Sinatra — and the possibilities of orchestral arrangement. He was struck by the way Nelson Riddle’s arrangements on Sinatra’s breakup album “In the Wee Small Hours” provided commentary, color and context. “He was tone painting,” Tunick said.College was followed by 10 years of fitful work as an arranger and orchestrator before a big break: orchestrating “Promises, Promises,” whose jazz-inflected score by Burt Bacharach brought a refreshingly contemporary sound to Broadway.Emboldened by that show’s success, Tunick called up Sondheim, whose originality and wit as a composer he had admired since hearing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Tunick offered Sondheim his services for his next project.When he first heard the piano renditions of the songs that would become “Company,” Tunick was taken aback. With a few exceptions — “Barcelona” sounds like Erik Satie by way of Brazil, he observed — the score had a sound entirely of its own. “If anything it was sort of like Stravinsky, but not quite,” Tunick said, citing the peculiar melodies and rhythm of “The Little Things You Do Together” as an example of Sondheim’s startling originality. “What is that? In every case I had to give it careful thought.”Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, and will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.James Estrin/The New York TimesInitially, Tunick wasn’t overly confident in his ability to do justice to the material. “I was terrified,” he said. But, starting with “Company,” Tunick helped define the characteristic Sondheim sound. In contrast to the sumptuous blare of an entire orchestra at full blast, this was a sound defined by crisper lines, purer colors, more instrumental solos, more variation and contrast of tonal effects.That sound is certainly present in “Here We Are,” the new musical about privileged urbanites trapped in an existential nightmare. Befitting the sinister surrealism of the source material — the Luis Buñuel films “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” — Tunick’s underscoring at times resembles the effervescently weird music of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And, once again, the orchestra knows something the characters don’t, greeting the happy exclamation “What a perfect day!” with notes that jar and thud.Orchestrating that show after Sondheim’s death in 2021 was “like going through the letters of a deceased friend,” said Tunick, “editing them for publication.” Tunick was happy with the result. “We went out on a high note,” he added.The musical collaboration will carry on, though.Having already reorchestrated several Sondheim shows — not just the ones he orchestrated originally — Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, rendering it more suitable for performance by symphony orchestras and in opera houses. He will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.In an even more profound and lasting way, of course, through cast albums and successive productions, the Sondheim-Tunick collaboration will continue to inspire generations of musical theater lovers — and reward ever closer listening.Tunick’s last meeting with Sondheim turned out to be only weeks before the composer’s death, at a concert of Tunick’s work at Sharon Playhouse in Connecticut. Tunick took the opportunity to say a few words to his longtime collaborator: “I know you hate sentimentality. But I have to tell you how much it’s meant to me, working with you all these years.”As Tunick tearily remembers it, Sondheim put his arm around him, saying, “Jonathan, we’re lucky we met one another.” More

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    Stephen Sondheim Belongs in the Pantheon of American Composers

    “You know, I had the idealistic notion, when I was 20, that I was going into the theater,” Stephen Sondheim once said. “I wasn’t; I was going into show business, and I was a fool to think otherwise.”It was a remark characteristic of Sondheim, the titan of musical theater whose decades’ worth of credits as a composer and lyricist included “West Side Story,” “Company” and “Into the Woods.” Here he was as many had seen him in interviews over the years: unsentimental and a bit flip, self-effacing to the point of selling himself short.Because among musical theater artists of his generation, Sondheim, who died in 2021 at 91, was arguably the most artistic — challenging, unusual, incapable of superficiality in a medium often dismissed as superficial. He was, perhaps to his disappointment, not the best businessman, with shows that rarely lasted long on Broadway. And his work was better for it.Sondheim has always had a dedicated fan base, but right now his musicals are true hot tickets with substantial real estate on New York stages. Recently, it was possible to take in four Sondheim shows in a single weekend: “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway, “The Frogs” in a starry concert presentation by MasterVoices, and “Here We Are,” his unfinished final work, completed and in its premiere run at the Shed.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe in “Merrily We Roll Along” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTogether, they form a portrait that helps in considering Sondheim’s place among American composers. I say American because Broadway, alongside jazz, is the most homegrown of this country’s music, and his work constantly pushed the art form further. Where so many of his colleagues have operated within standard structures, he, even in writing a 32-bar song, seemed to always ask, “What else is possible?”It’s also important to consider Sondheim as a distinctly American composer because his writing reflects a creative mind repeatedly fixated on the idea of his homeland, with an ambivalence by turns affectionate and acerbic. It’s there in his lyric contribution to “Gypsy,” arguably the Great American Musical, which the musicologist Raymond Knapp has described as “a version of the American dream that leads, as if inevitably, to striptease.” And it continues, with an unconventional patriotism in “Assassins” and a revealing journey across state lines and years in “Road Show.”In that sense, Sondheim is not only one of the finest American composers, but also one of the most essential.“He and Lenny are at the top of that list,” Paul Gemignani, Sondheim’s longtime music director, said, referring also to Leonard Bernstein. “Most Broadway composers are writing pop tunes. Steve never wrote a pop tune. ‘Send in the Clowns’ got lucky.”Sondheim seemed fated to create musical theater at a higher level than his colleagues. Like Bernstein, he was pedigreed: His mentor, for lyric writing, was Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein; for composition, the modernist Milton Babbitt. Yet he emulated neither.In an interview with the Sondheim Review, Sondheim said that he was trained by Hammerstein “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” But he thought of them in more classical terms: “sonata form — statement, development and recapitulation.”And while Sondheim composed with the spirit of an avant-gardist, he was more of a postmodernist than Babbitt, though he described Babbitt as a closet songwriter who admired Kern and Arlen as much as Mozart and Schoenberg.“The first hour of each of our weekly sessions would be devoted to analyzing a song like ‘All the Things That You Are,’” Sondheim recalled, “the next three to the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, always concentrating on the tautness of the structures, the leanness and frugality of the musical ideas.” Genre didn’t matter; craft did, which is why one of their most influential lessons entailed how a Bach fugue built, as Babbitt put it, an entire cathedral from a four-note theme. Sondheim would later do the same in the score of “Anyone Can Whistle.”As a university student, Sondheim wrote some juvenilia as a lyricist-composer — most intriguingly, fragments of a “Mary Poppins” musical that predates the Disney movie by over a decade. But, after a false start, his first professional credit was as the lyricist on “West Side Story.” “Gypsy” followed, with music by Jule Styne, but it wasn’t until “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” that Broadway saw its first show with both music and lyrics by Sondheim.He was often asked which came first, the music or the lyrics. The most accurate answer is probably sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, but with a deference to clarity of text. Like Wagner, who wrote the librettos of his operas, Sondheim wanted his lyrics to be heard and understood; his vocal lines resemble those of Janacek and Debussy, whose dramas unfurl with the rhythm of speech.Hal Prince, left, and Sondheim in 1988.Kyle Ericksen/Getty ImagesSondheim’s most prolific, and ambitious, period began with the concept musical “Company” (1970) and his collaborations with the eminent producer and director Hal Prince. Gemignani said that, together, they “never compromised on bringing their ideas to life.” It was during this period that Sondheim emerged as a postmodernist in the vein of John Adams, with a deep well of references presented with a wink or sincerity, but above all with dramaturgical purpose.That might be why “Follies,” from 1971, has been called a “post-musical musical.” Its score abounds in pastiche — what is “Losing My Mind” if not a Gershwin tune from an alternate universe? — and artful irony, such as dissonances that betray the darker truth of “The Road You Didn’t Take.”For “Pacific Overtures” (1976), Sondheim took a similar approach to Puccini in “Turandot,” by putting authentic sounds — in this case, Kabuki music — through his own idiomatic prism. But, like Puccini, he suggests rather than represents, unable to escape a Western perspective while purportedly telling a story from a Japanese point of view. It’s a contradiction that doesn’t serve the musical as well as the more globalist style of “Someone in a Tree,” a song that brought a simplistic American Minimalism to Broadway.Inspired by the spareness of Japanese visual art, Sondheim composed an analogue in a song that does little more than develop a single chord, over and over. As Philip Glass and Steve Reich were applying a world-music sensibility to the classical sphere, Sondheim wrote his own kind of repetitive phase music. “It’s not insignificant that when I met Steve Reich,” Sondheim later wrote, “he told me how much he loved this show.”He was on culturally surer ground with “A Little Night Music” (1973), in which the idea of variation is applied to waltz-like melodies in three. He wrote that his favorite form was the theme and variations, and that he respected Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” This musical came closer to that piece than anything else Sondheim wrote, with a hint of Sibelius.“The Frogs,” presented by MasterVoices, at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in November.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesSondheim’s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was both consistent and chameleonic, never more so than in “Sweeney,” which displays his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.Aside from “Passion” (1994), it is Sondheim’s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, yet he bristled at the idea of “Sweeney” being called an opera or an operetta and once wrote that “when ‘Porgy and Bess’ was performed on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, it was an opera.” (That’s not true. It was always an opera, and played on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)All told, “Sweeney” is a hybrid of music theater, one that brings in yet another medium: cinema. Sondheim believed that, with all due respect, “John Williams is responsible for “Jaws,” not Steven Spielberg.” His score for “Sweeney” is similarly rich with edge-of-your-seat underscoring, while the lyrics are both ingenious and inherently melodic. Sondheim was proud of the opening line of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” and rightfully so: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” sets a mood of theatrical artifice and anachronism, with a piercing consonance in the T’s as unsettling as Nabokov’s “tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” in “Lolita.”Josh Groban, left, and Annaleigh Ashford in “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, it must be said, that the sound of Sondheim would not be such without a crucial collaborator: Jonathan Tunick, his orchestrator to this day. (The scores of all four shows I recently attended were arranged by him.) Sondheim composed at his piano, then sang through while accompanying himself; from there, Tunick teased out the textures of his playing into entire instrumental ensembles.In an interview, Tunick said that you can’t overthink the process. “I was able to tell a great deal, not only from the actual notes but from the way he played them,” he added, “the way he phrased, the way he attacked a chord.” He described the transformation as, more than anything, “Dionysian.” At its fullest, the arrangement on Broadway now, the “Sweeney” score abounds in colorful flourishes and bone-rattling horror, the fluttering in the winds in one song as delicate as the low brasses are chilling at the start of “Epiphany.”If “Sweeney” reflects a worldview, a pretty dismal one, that speaks to America only allegorically, a more direct view of the country emerges in later works. “Merrily” comments obliquely on the period of history it covers, with the space-age promise of Sputnik giving way to cynical neoliberalism. And American themes are even more overt in the shows that brought Sondheim back together with John Weidman, the book writer of “Pacific Overtures”: “Assassins” (1990) and “Road Show,” a troubled musical that went through multiple revisions and titles before premiering in its final form in 2008. Both shows are flawed — “Road Show” structurally, and “Assassins” for its disturbing pageant of mental illness — but reflect the promise and tragedy of the American dream.“Assassins” goes so far as to propose “Another National Anthem,” which reads as a litany of disenfranchisement from a cast of characters who all feel let down by a system that was supposed to work for them; it’s not far from the complaints that fueled distrust of government today and the rise of Donald J. Trump.Micaela Diamond, left, and fellow cast members in the premiere run of “Here We Are” at the Shed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore barbed yet is “Here We Are,” in its sendup of elitism and the privilege of both apathy and revolt. For better and worse, the score has a valedictory spirit, recalling earlier work without quoting it exactly, and the lyrics contain satirical observations that wouldn’t be out of place in “Company.”My generation of theater fans came of age loving “Into the Woods,” which, because of its enduring popularity as theater for children, will remain onstage far into the future. But the Sondheim works most likely to last, from a purely musical perspective, are those that least readily show their age, and happen to be classical-leaning and postmodern: “Follies” is timelessly Broadway; “A Little Night Music,” universally elegant; “Sweeney,” perennially effective.Gemignani called “Sweeney” Sondheim’s “Porgy and Bess.” Like that show, it has played in Broadway theaters and opera houses alike. And like that show, it’s the masterpiece of a great American composer. More