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Anthony de Mare, Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim from the Piano. ECM New Series, 2470–72 481 1780, 2015, CD.

Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim from the Piano is the brainchild of pianist– composer Anthony de Mare, who brought together thirty-six other contemporary composers and asked them for a pianistic take on a song by Stephen Sondheim, one of the most celebrated composers of American musical theater.1 It is an ambitious endeavor, asking composers to unite the seemingly incommensurate worlds of the Broadway musical and contemporary composition, and for the most part it succeeds. De Mare sought composers from a variety of backgrounds, including theater, film, jazz, and avant-garde communities. The result is thirty-seven tracks that span a dizzying array of styles and moods, yet are connected through Sondheim’s singular musical voice. Sondheim was inspired by a wide range of composers, from Richard Rodgers to Milton Babbitt, and many of the composers in Liaisons choose to unravel a single thread of influence within the fabric of his sound. Nico Muhly’s “Color and Light” (based on the song from Sunday in the Park with George), reveals Sondheim’s debt to minimalism, recombining and reconfiguring the song’s musical motives into a kaleidoscope of sounds and patterns. Musical ideas constantly reemerge in different contexts, filtered through Muhly’s swirling, pointillist language, which recalls George Seurat’s precise and dense brush-strokes in “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the painting at the center of the show. On the other end of the spectrum, Kenji Bunch’s “The Demon Barber” evokes the cheap melodramas and Grand Guignol of the nineteenth century that inspired Sweeney Todd. Lisztian quotations of the “Dies Irae” erupt from low rumbling textures, then give way to pianistic evocations of screams and factory whistles, mixing drama and music in a particularly Sondheimian fashion. Other composers chose to write musical portraits of Sondheim’s colorful range of characters. In a delightfully creative move, Andy Akiho uses a prepared piano to portray the various fairy tale figures of Into the Woods in timbre rather than lyrics, and his evocation of the witch is particularly inspired. David Rakowski gives us a psychological exploration of the deeply unhappy Joanne from Company in his version of “Ladies Who Lunch” by juxtaposing fragments of the melody, first with dreamy melancholia, then with aggressive jazziness, while Jherek Bischoff plays with Charles Guiteau’s (from Assassins) tenuous grasp on reality by turning his jaunty hymn into a manic cakewalk. Many of the composers take Sondheim’s songs as the starting point to explore their own lives. Frederic Rzewski’s deeply personal interpretation, “I’m Still Here” from Follies, becomes a meditation on the loss of a friend. Sondheim’s original melody is barely present in this haunting, intense track, which takes the