
This three-disc solo-piano recital of recompositions of Stephen Sondheim songs isn’t a jazz set – contemporary-classical pianist Anthony de Mare stays close to the scores written by 36 invited Sondheim “reimaginers”. But since Wynton Marsalis, Fred Hersch and the Bad Plus’s Ethan Iverson are among them, it fascinatingly mixes jazz references with many other contemporary approaches. Of the jazz pieces, Marsalis’s invites a ragtime strut on That Old Piano (from Follies), while Iverson delivers a fractured, waywardly modulated introspection on Send in the Clowns. Postminimalist Eve Beglarian substitutes a hypnotic, perpetual-motion maths pattern for Sondheim’s harmonies on Perpetual Happiness, Andy Akiho’s Into the Woods is a prepared-piano rattle, Steve Reich’s Finishing the Hat threads the original tune through jabbing rhythm patterns, Tania León’s Going … Gone mixes traditional Cuban quotes and abstract treble scamperings. It’s fascinating when it’s jazz, and when it isn’t, and de Mare is imperturbable across every idiomatic test.
