(Stephen Holden’s article appeared in The New York Times, 2/1; via Pam Green.)
Oscillating tones, shimmering and percussive, echoed through the Appel Room on Saturday as an array of musicians from various musical worlds performed works by Stephen Sondheim and Steve Reich. This Lincoln Center American Songbook concert was a genial two-hour-plus seminar, moderated by John Schaefer, in which the composers chatted and compared notes in a program whose selections followed a through-line, each piece roughly continuing the style of the one before. An excellent trio (Tedd Firth on piano, John Beal on bass, Paul Pizzuti on drums) anchored Mr. Sondheim’s songs.
The concert illustrated a mutual interest in what, for lack of a better term, might be called musical pointillism. Mr. Sondheim freely acknowledged his debt to Mr. Reich in his score for “Sunday in the Park With George,” the musical written with James Lapine, about the painter Georges Seurat and his most famous work, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/arts/music/sondheim-and-reich-at-lincoln-center.html?_r=0