Opus Two Celebrates Sondheim and Bernstein in Review
Opus Two: William Terwilliger, violin; Andrew Cooperstock, piano
With Eric Stern, host, arranger; Elena Shaddow, vocals
Feinstein’s/54 Below, New York, NY
November 23, 2021
First off, let me say what a pleasure it is to attend a violin/piano duo recital that does NOT contain the Franck Sonata (not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that work). Opus Two has well established its unconventional approach, with special attention to genres other than the standard ‘classical’ repertoire. In the “swellegant” atmosphere of Feinstein’s/54 Below they provided an evening of good listening. The few caveats I cite below are quibbles, but important ones. This concert was planned for the ninetieth birthday observances for Stephen Sondheim (2020), but a certain virus derailed all of our plans.
To begin, although the well-heeled audience was eating ($36 dollar hangar steaks and the like) and drinking, necessarily maskless, William Terwilliger and Andrew Cooperstock performed with masks on, robbing them of important visual emotive cues, rendering them somewhat remote. The host, and their arranger of ten years, Eric Stern, narrated his somewhat superfluous chat without a mask; and the singer they brought to assist in three numbers, Elena Shaddow, sang maskless as well.
The dry acoustics of Feinstein’s, while not injurious to most cabaret-style performances, were somewhat unforgiving, especially to Mr. Terwilliger’s violin, and they made the beautiful Steinway, ably played by Mr. Cooperstock, sound glassy and brittle. One longed for some reverberance. The Duo’s recordings are much more refined than this.
Transcribing and arranging are noble and ancient arts. Many composers have enjoyed doing so. I’m thinking especially of Franz Liszt, who brought entire operas to life with his ten fingers to small towns across Europe
where the residents may not have been able to access an actual opera in a large cultural center. He also transformed dozens of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and others for piano solo.
The best transcribers of vocal music manage to make us “hear” the words despite their absence. I feel Opus Two’s program would best be appreciated by people who already know the words. Bernstein’s reputation as a classical composer is canonic at this point, I feel Sondheim should equally be in this category—he himself cited Britten, Ravel, and Stravinsky as his main influences, and of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Many years ago, the common wisdom stated that Brahms’ Lieder were so instrumentally conceived that they could easily be played on violin, viola, or cello without losing any of their value. I would never argue with one of my professors, but for me a poem, and its evoked emotions, inspired the work to begin with. Thus the fun arrangements this evening, some extravagantly virtuosic, by Mr. Stern, ought to have done more than just ornament the notes.
They began with the Four Moments from Bernstein’s Candide, which suffered from a technical mishap in the slide projections which wrongly labeled each selection. Sadly, I don’t think anyone but me and the reviewer seated next to me knew the difference. The tempos seemed stiff and conservative especially in Glitter and Be Gay. Here is a prime example of my point: When a coloratura soprano sings a high E-flat amid a welter of rapid bouncing back and forth, it’s quite an achievement—when a violin does it, it’s normal, not so extraordinary. I often felt that the sense of giddiness didn’t make it into the arrangement, though Mr. Stern kept Mr.Terwilliger quite busy with difficult figurations, most of which were met with aplomb, despite intonation issues and the acoustic mentioned previously.
For two songs about ‘houses’ the Opus Two brought onstage Broadway’s soprano Elena Shaddow, who had an appropriately Wendy-like innocence for My House from Peter Pan, though she lacked the gravitas for Abigail Adams singing Take Care of this House (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) amid the ruins of the White House in 1814, sounding merely petulant. She should have held her final notes longer, to end together with the violin/ensemble; it left a curious, unfinished feeling.
I am stridently against the transformation of Somewhere from West Side Story into a sort of feel-good Muzak number. Of course, at its initial appearance, the song heralds the love of Tony and Maria against all odds—but for me it is the reprise with Maria holding the dead Tony in her arms that is the true psychological underpinning of this music, and it should end with the discordant tritone found at the end of the musical, not a bland “C major,” even at the risk of making the listener uncomfortable. After all…
Shaddow returned for the beautiful I Remember (Sondheim) from Evening Primrose, a television drama from 1966. Ella, who was trapped in a department store at age six, but is now nineteen, falls in love with The Poet, who has taken refuge in the store present-day. The evil master of all the souls who come to life after closing hours turns them into mannequins in the window, where Ella can finally, tragically, see her sky again. Ms. Shaddow lacked the poignance and complexity of this song of memory—when the line comes “I would gladly die, for a day of sky,” one should not feel good about it.
Finally, the Duo performed Mr. Stern’s Suite from A Little Night Music, whose music is all in ¾ waltz time. Here again, the violin/piano failed to suggest the words. The longing of a certain syllable, the stresses and releases, the wistful floating off, especially in Send in the Clowns, didn’t find their way into Mr. Terwillger’s playing, busy as he was with figurations provided by Mr. Stern, which here I felt oddly could have been even more extravagant.
At any rate, as I said before, these are the quibbles of a cranky reviewer approaching this from the classical side. The audience didn’t mind, and was extremely appreciative.
