INTERVIEW: Sondheim’s songs receive the chamber treatment, courtesy of Opus Two
Photo: Opus Two consists of William Terwilliger on violin and Andrew Cooperstock on piano. Photo courtesy of the artists / Provided by Crossover Media with permission.
Ever since Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021, the world of musical theater has celebrated the mighty composer with new productions of his beloved works. On Broadway right now is a revival of Gypsy starring Audra McDonald and a new revue called Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, starring Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga.
Opus Two, featuring William Terwilliger on violin and Andrew Cooperstock on piano, is getting in on the celebrations with the release of the new album Opus Two Celebrates Stephen Sondheim: New Chamber Music Arrangements. The recording, featuring arrangements by Eric Stern, consists of such classics as “Broadway Baby,” “Every Day a Little Death,” “Finishing the Hat” and “Not While I’m Around.” There are also suites from A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd.
“The idea came about in a couple of ways,” Cooperstock said in a recent phone interview. “One, Bill and I have been a duo for over 30 years, and a lot of that time we’ve identified with American music as well as the standard repertoire. We won a State Department tour audition back in the early-’90s where we were sent overseas to perform and especially to feature and talk about American music.”
Those overseas trips inspired the duo to kickstart a recording process that would have them performing chamber pieces of the best music that American composers had to offer. For example, they recorded the complete works of Aaron Copeland, plus albums of music by Paul Schoenfield, Robert Starer and Lowell Liebermann. They then turned to Leonard Bernstein to celebrate that composer’s centenary. For that project, they needed some more material and decided to include selections from Bernstein’s Candide, which, of course, features some contributions by Sondheim. Stern was the arranger on that Candide piece, and the musicians with Opus Two enjoyed how the project turned out.
“[Stern] understood the violin and piano very well and how to create an arrangement for both of those instruments,” Cooperstock said. “And Eric is a wonderful pianist. He made an arrangement of songs from Girl Crazy for our George Gershwin album after that, so there was a little bit of crossover there. And he is the impetus for the Sondheim project because we asked him, ‘What would you like to arrange for us next?’ And he said, ‘How about Stephen Sondheim?’ And we said, ‘We love his music. We’ve been attending his shows for a long time. We’re big fans, but how will this music hold up without the words?’ And he said, ‘I think without the words you’ll really get to appreciate the complexity of the music.’ So that’s how the idea started.”
Terwilliger said that Sondheim was a master lyricist, and many of his songs are known for their clever words (“A Little Priest,” for example). So he had some reservations about stripping these tunes of an element that audiences seemed to adore. He wasn’t immediately sold on the idea.
“We thought that if we strip away the lyrics, the songs might suffer a little bit because there’s such an imagination in both their turns of phrase and the depth of emotion and the cleverness of the lyrics,” Terwilliger said. “And we were worried that we would do a disservice to Sondheim’s songs if we stripped the lyrics away and just had the music. So Eric Stern, who knew Sondheim over the years, said, ‘I absolutely disagree. Sondheim wanted to be recognized for his beautiful melodies and his interesting rhythms and phrasings as music itself.’ And I think Eric stated it very eloquently in his words about the CD and the music on the CD, so [Sondheim] was very proud of the music that he wrote. In fact, even though he was a lyricist for one of the greatest Broadway musicals of all time, West Side Story, I think he always yearned and felt more creatively complete by writing both words and the music.”
Although performing Sondheim’s works might seem like a right turn for Opus Two, Cooperstock doesn’t feel that way. Obviously Sondheim is more musical theater than classical, but these two performers have been dedicated to American music for the past few decades, and what’s more American than the Broadway stage, as they like to say.
“We’d been familiar with his work for a really long time, but to actually play the work ourselves and to really dig into it and to think about interpreting each phrase and to watch the shows again and know exactly what’s happening,” Cooperstock said, “to perform this music in concert live and to think what we would like audiences to know about each of the pieces and thinking about the order of the music even on the CD or in a recital, how one piece leads to another … we really try to throw ourselves into a project and try to squeeze every drop of possibility out of it.”
Terwilliger added: “I feel these are iconic melodies that a lot of people know. Who doesn’t know ‘Send in the Clowns’? … That’s the thing about Sondheim. There’s such inner-complexity that is, of course, revealed a lot through the lyrics, but into the music itself, there’s just so much there that you can work with. And also Eric has a wonderful way of balancing the instruments, so he literally turns these into chamber pieces. There’s this equal dialogue. It’s not like he just gives the vocal line to the violin because it’s more of a vocal-type instrument, so there’s a lot of interplay that we really appreciate that Eric puts into it. It brings out a lot of the possibilities even beyond the music itself.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Opus Two’s new album Opus Two Celebrates Stephen Sondheim: New Chamber Music Arrangements is out now from Bridge Records 9605. Click here for more information.
