{"id":2502,"date":"2021-12-02T17:32:16","date_gmt":"2021-12-02T17:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/?p=2502"},"modified":"2021-12-02T17:32:16","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T17:32:16","slug":"blog-december-2nd-stephen-sondheim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/?p=2502","title":{"rendered":"Blog December 2nd Stephen Sondheim"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2503\" src=\"http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402-624x624.jpg 624w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/stephen-sondheim-9488709-1-402.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><br \/>\nStephen Sonheim<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Judy Collins - Send In The Clowns (Live)\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_W3v2RC8PcY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>My old friend Martin Connor who lectures at the prestigious \u201cGuildhall School of Music and Drama\u201d\u201d invited me to see his students perform the musical \u201cA Little Light Music.\u201d I did not know the show and remember not being particularly impressed until about half way through the second act when I heard the instrumental intro and then the words \u201cIsn\u2019t it rich- are we a pair\u201d and from then on, I was captivated and \u201cSend in the Clouds\u201d became one of my favourite songs.<br \/>\nAnd as I am sure you are aware the composer was Stephen Sondheim who died this week aged 91. Here are some extracts from his obituary in The Guardian.<br \/>\nSondheim was a leading light of musical theatre over the course of more than six decades, from the moment in 1957 when he achieved renown as Leonard Bernstein\u2019s lyricist for West Side Story he went on to establish a place for himself with intelligent, unconventional works such as Company (1970), Sweeney Todd (1979)<br \/>\n\u201cSend in the Clowns\u201d was his most famous, song, recorded more than 500 times \u2013 notably by Frank Sinatra in 1973 \u2013 and then in 1975 and 77 by Judy Collins. (Today\u2019s featured song is sung live by Judy while she was in her eighties!)<br \/>\nBorn in New York, Stephen was the only child of a comfortably middle-class family. His mother, Janet (nee Fox, and known as Foxy), a dress designer, and father, Herbert, a clothing manufacturer, were partners in a New York fashion business. They divorced when Stephen was 10, and he ended up disliking his mother so much that in 1992 he did not go to her funeral.<br \/>\nFoxy was friends with the wife of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (of \u201cRogers and Hammerstein, South Pacific\u201d fame.) After her divorce Foxy and Stephen moved to live near the Hammerstein\u2019s, on a farm in Pennsylvania. During his adolescence, Sondheim would look to Hammerstein as a substitute father.<br \/>\nSondheim had started playing the piano by ear from the age of four, before studying the piano and organ sporadically at school. Ravel was one of his early musical discoveries, which he eagerly shared with Hammerstein.<br \/>\nHe wrote a musical called \u201cBy George,\u201d and showed it to Hammerstein, who said it was terrible but talented, and showed him where he had gone wrong. This process turned into an unofficial yet fundamental course on which Sondheim learned to write musicals, adapting various plays, working on non-dramatic narrative and creating an original story. While many musical-theatre creators specialise as either a composer or lyricist, Sondheim excelled at both.<br \/>\nThe Queens Theatre in Shaftsbury Avenue was renamed in 2020 by Cameron Mackintosh as the Sondheim Theatre and Macintosh said on hearing of Sondheim\u2019s death \u201cThe theatre has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers.\u201d Andrew Lloyd Webber called him \u201cThe musical theatre giant of our times, an inspiration not just to two but to three generations [whose] contribution to theatre will never be equalled\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Quote of the week <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS.webp\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-2504\" src=\"http:\/\/www.risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS-300x157.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"157\" srcset=\"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS-300x157.webp 300w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS-768x403.webp 768w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS-624x327.webp 624w, https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/SS.webp 1017w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stephen Sonheim My old friend Martin Connor who lectures at the prestigious \u201cGuildhall School of Music and Drama\u201d\u201d invited me to see his students perform the musical \u201cA Little Light Music.\u201d I did not know the show and remember not being particularly impressed until about half way through the second act when I heard the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken-shearsmiths-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2505,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2502\/revisions\/2505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}