RHIANNON GIDDENS

Young old-timer hails Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George(Red Seal Digital, 1984)

Stephen Sondheim blew her mind, changing her life with Sunday In The Park With George. And on the same page, a new series of Can live albums has begun.

I was a senior in high school, and I’d gone to choral camp in Laurinburg, North Carolina. It was the first time I’d ever been exposed to musical theatre nerds, and they were obsessed with Sondheim, so I thought, Well, it must be good. I watched a video of a stage performance [of Sunday…] in college a year later and that was it, I was blown away.

Some people say he’s not singable, or hummable, which is ridiculous. There are things you get right off the bat, and things you get with each successive listen, which is the mark of a deep piece of art, I think. There are so many beautiful tunes, his wordplay, the harmonies and shifts, the emotional content of the story between George and Dot, the way it moves back and forth in time – it has such a beautiful shape to it. And there are huge, important statements he’s making about what it means to be an artist. I can hear, in my own writing, moments that are definitely Sondheim and specifically Sunday….

Dot is the role I would love to play. It frustrates me because the whole point is, Dot has to look like the person in the painting [the piece is inspired by Seurat’s 1886 work A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte], and I’m not white! Maybe this is how white people feel when they want to be in Porgy & Bess. But who knows? Sondheim’s got close ties to Nonesuch, and I’m thinking, Wouldn’t it be nice to shake his hand? But I met Aretha Franklin and spoke gibberish, and if I did that [to Sondheim] I’d be mortified forever, so I’d be happy to just be in the same room as him.

I showed it to my partner for the first time a week or so ago, and I was so nervous, like, if he doesn’t like it, I don’t know what I’m gonna do! He liked it.

Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi release They’re Calling Me Home on Nonesuch on April 9.