The Gershwin brothers took Duke, then a Russian emigré named Vladimir Dukelsky, under their wing in the 1930s, and his early projects went well. Vernon Duke’s brilliance as a songwriter was matched by his bad luck and bad judgment in the theater. And only Hugo Wolf can match Sondheim for turning perfectly inflected line-readings into melody. Smart, psychologically astute, and ultimately quite touching, “Country House” shows us a side of Phyllis and Ben Stone that makes them more sympathetic and vulnerable. Sondheim and Goldman eventually withdrew the London version of Follies as a failed experiment, preferring the disquieting original. In the 1971 Broadway script they had dialogue scenes but they never sang together. To that end they tweaked the libretto and added three new songs including “Country House,” sung by the wealthy, unhappily married Phyllis and Ben. Sondheim and his book writer William Goldman made a conscious attempt to add more comedy to their brilliant but problematic musical. “Country House” comes from the 1987 London production of Follies. Sondheim slyly recycled “Two Fairy Tales” as an instrumental piece: it became the tedious piano exercise played by Desirée’s daughter Frederika. Its dazzling wit shed a bit of light on their characters, but it did nothing to advance the story in Act II when the action needs the most velocity. “Two Fairy Tales” was written for the two ingénues in A Little Night Music, Hendrik and Anne. The two Stephen Sondheim songs are comparative rarities from this often-sung composer.
Below: a quick guide to those recherché numbers. But there are a some lesser-known pieces in the program about which you may be curious.
A few of the composers, classical icons like Saint-Saëns and Strauss, won’t require biographical sketches for experienced concert-goers. All of our composers and lyricists are exposing the exalted, messy truth about love - Schubert and Irving Berlin, Fauré and Jason Robert Brown, Brahms and Ed Kleban. Love is at once the highest expression of humanity and an unruly biological urge, a blissful merging and a litigious, daily negotiation. Tonight’s playlist careens from the sublime to the ridiculous. Once again life vibrates with possibilities- and memories. For a reflective coda, I drew on a Spanish song by the Catalan composer Manuel Oltra set to a Lorca poem. Lieder offered the most beautiful, complex examples of mature love tinged with loneliness and betrayal. But German song seemed right for the closing section. English is also the best language for Act III, “Philandering.” After all, you don’t want to miss any of the juicy details. “But you said,” “But I never meant,” “I just can’t stand…!” Suddenly we go from wings of song to the language of negotiation, recrimination, and comedy: English. But when that moment wears off and reality sets in, things suddenly get more literal. The couples fall in love to French romantic art song, which evokes that wonderful moment of infatuation when life sparkles with promise, the spirit shimmers, and the words lovers exchange are perhaps more beautiful for the way they sound than for what they actually mean. Wild oats sown, the four come warily back together with more experience, more wisdom, more doubts - and fuller hearts.Įach of the four chapters demanded its own language and musical genre. The men experiment (including a fling with one another), while the girls drop all inhibitions and indulge their sexual whims. Soon the guys feel trapped and the women feel betrayed, and then all hell breaks loose. In our concert two couples meet and fall in love, but the honeymoon fades. Both works are about the disruptive interplay of love and lust, fidelity and libido, id and superego. This program takes its inspiration from an opera - Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte - and a movie, Max Ophuls’ La ronde, which was based on the hugely controversial play by Arthur Schnitzler, Reigen.
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