| A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | March 3, 2017 | |||
| Recorded | May 2016 | |||
| Venue | Boettcher Concert Hall, Denver, Colorado | |||
| Genre | Pop | |||
| Length | 35:34 | |||
| Label | Cleopatra | |||
| Producer |
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| Judy Collins chronology | ||||
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| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| The Arts Desk |   [1] |
A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim is a studio album by American singer Judy Collins, released on March 3, 2017, on Cleopatra Records under license from Wildflower Records.
This project continues a series of tributes to the authors whose songs Collins performed during her career. Stephen Sondheim played an important role in the singer's career, for the performance of his song "Send In the Clowns" the singer received two Grammy Award nominations, [2] the Judith album, on which it was included, sold a million copies in the United States. [3]
In May 2016, at the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver, the singer recorded an hour-long musical concert film A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim, during which Collins performed his most popular compositions ("Not a Day Goes By", "Finishing the Hat", "Take Me to the World", "Anyone Can Whistle" and "I'm Still Here"), and also shared her memories of Sondheim and Broadway. [4] The accompaniment was composed by pianist Russell Walden. The film was shown on television in the United States on August 26, 2016.
In February 2017, the singer decided to release a recording from the concert on DVD, [4] followed by a studio album with the best numbers performed during the concert — on March 3, 2017, the album became available for purchase on CD and in digital format. The singer also gave several live performances with a new repertoire in 2017. [5]
All tracks are written by Stephen Sondheim
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "No One Is Alone" | 3:07 |
| 2. | "Finishing the Hat" | 2:55 |
| 3. | "Not While I'm Around" | 2:51 |
| 4. | "Take Me to the World" | 2:54 |
| 5. | "Liaisons" | 4:58 |
| 6. | "Move On" | 3:56 |
| 7. | "Not a Day Goes By" | 3:26 |
| 8. | "Send In the Clowns" | 3:58 |
| 9. | "I'm Still Here" | 4:48 |
| 10. | "Anyone Can Whistle" | 2:40 |
| Total length: | 35:34 | |
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes. [6]
Follies is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman.
"Send In the Clowns" is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. It is a ballad from Act Two, in which the character Desirée reflects on the ironies and disappointments of her life. Among other things, she looks back on an affair years earlier with the lawyer Fredrik, who was deeply in love with her, but whose marriage proposals she had rejected. Meeting him after so long, she realizes she is in love with him and finally ready to marry him, but now it is he who rejects her: He is in an unconsummated marriage with a much younger woman. Desirée proposes marriage to rescue him from this situation, but he declines, citing his dedication to his bride. Reacting to his rejection, Desirée sings this song. The song is later reprised as a coda after Fredrik's young wife runs away with his son, and Fredrik is finally free to accept Desirée's offer.
Judith Marjorie Collins is an American singer-songwriter and musician with a career spanning seven decades. An Academy Award-nominated documentary director and a Grammy Award-winning recording artist, she is known for her eclectic tastes in the material she records, for her social activism, and for the clarity of her voice. Her discography consists of 36 studio albums, nine live albums, numerous compilation albums, four holiday albums, and 21 singles.
Bernadette Peters is an American actress and singer. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she has starred in musical theatre, television and film, performed in solo concerts and released recordings. She is a critically acclaimed Broadway performer, having received seven nominations for Tony Awards, winning two, and nine Drama Desk Award nominations, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards.
Leon Russell was an American musician and songwriter who was involved with numerous bestselling records during his 60-year career that spanned multiple genres, including rock and roll, country, gospel, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, southern rock, blues rock, folk, surf and the Tulsa sound. His recordings earned six gold records and he received two Grammy Awards from seven nominations. In 1973 Billboard named Russell the "Top Concert Attraction in the World". In 2011, he was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Barbara Cook was an American actress and singer who first came to prominence in the 1950s as the lead in the original Broadway musicals Plain and Fancy (1955), Candide (1956) and The Music Man (1957) among others, winning a Tony Award for the last. She continued performing mostly in theatre until the mid-1970s, when she began a second career as a cabaret and concert singer. She also made numerous recordings.
Judy Kuhn is an American actress, singer and activist, known for her work in musical theatre. A four-time Tony Award nominee, she has released four studio albums and sang the title role in the 1995 film Pocahontas, including her rendition of the song "Colors of the Wind", which won its composers the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
"I Want You Back" is the first national single by the Jackson 5. It was released by Motown in October 1969, and became the first number-one hit for the band on January 31, 1970. It was performed on the band's first television appearances, on October 18, 1969, on The Hollywood Palace and on their milestone performance on December 14, 1969, on The Ed Sullivan Show. "I Want You Back" has sold over 6 million copies worldwide.
Eric Andersen is an American folk music singer-songwriter, who has written songs recorded by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, the Grateful Dead, Rick Nelson and many others. Early in his career, in the 1960s, he was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene. After two decades and sixteen albums of solo performance, he formed Danko/Fjeld/Andersen with Rick Danko and Jonas Fjeld, which released two albums in the early 1990s.
"Turn! Turn! Turn!", also known as or subtitled "To Everything There Is a Season", is a song written by Pete Seeger in 1959. The lyrics – except for the title, which is repeated throughout the song, and the final two lines – consist of the first eight verses of the third chapter of the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes. The song was originally released in 1962 as "To Everything There Is a Season" on the folk group the Limeliters' album Folk Matinee, and then some months later on Seeger's own The Bitter and the Sweet.
Judith is the tenth studio album by American singer and songwriter Judy Collins, released in 1975 by Elektra Records in both stereo (7E-1032) and CD-4 quadraphonic (EQ-1032) versions. Collins recorded Judith three years after her precedent album True Stories and Other Dreams, having been focused during the interim on producing Antonia: a Portrait of the Woman a documentary about Antonia Brico.
Melissa Errico is an American actress, singer, recording artist and writer. She is known for her Broadway musical roles such as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and the title role in One Touch of Venus, as well as her recordings of musical theater classics, including albums of songs by Stephen Sondheim and Michel Legrand. In recent years she has become a contributing writer to The New York Times and served on the National Endowment for the Arts.
"Losing My Mind" is a song written by Stephen Sondheim originally for the 1971 musical Follies for the character of a former showgirl, Sally Durant Plummer. The song became a popular top ten hit for singer and actress Liza Minnelli in 1989 on the UK Singles Chart and in Europe. "Losing My Mind" has been covered by many artists over the years.
"Somewhere", sometimes referred to as "Somewhere (There's a Place for Us)" or simply "There's a Place for Us", is a song from the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story that was made into films in 1961 and 2021. The music is composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
The discography of Judy Collins, an American singer and songwriter, consists of 36 studio albums, nine live albums, numerous compilation albums, four holiday albums, and 21 singles. She has two Platinum-certified albums, which includes a greatest hits collection, and four Gold-certified albums. Eleven of her singles have charted on the Billboard Hot 100, with five of them hitting the Top 40, and twelve have charted on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, with eleven hitting the Top 40.
Christian Hebel is an American violinist, songwriter, arranger and concertmaster. He has appeared on multi-Platinum, Gold, Emmy Award, Academy Awards, Tony Award, and Grammy Award winning recordings as well as film scores and Broadway theatre.
Everybody Knows is an album by Stephen Stills and Judy Collins, credited to "Stills & Collins". It marks the first collaboration between the former lovers and longtime friends. It was financed through a crowdfunding campaign on PledgeMusic.
Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano is a triple album performed by the pianist Anthony de Mare; ECM Records released the album in 2015. It consists of pieces inspired by the American musical theatre composer Stephen Sondheim's oeuvre and has works written by various classical, jazz, and other composers. The album consists of 37 tracks and is over three hours long. Composers who wrote pieces on the album include Jason Robert Brown, Michael Daugherty, Jake Heggie, Fred Hersch, Gabriel Kahane, Phil Kline, Ricardo Lorenz, Wynton Marsalis, Nico Muhly, Thomas Newman, Steve Reich, and Duncan Sheik. The album received mostly positive reviews. In 2020, the Liaisons team announced an additional 14 pieces to be recorded in 2023.
Spellbound is the twenty ninth studio album by American singer-songwriter Judy Collins, released on February 25, 2022 by Cleopatra Records. The album is Collins' first to contain completely original material. It earned Collins a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, her second in the category. Spellbound would also chart #60 on the Top Current Album Sales chart. Debuting on March 12, 2022 spending 1 week on the chart.
