Music of the Night: Lloyd Webber & Sondheim in Concert

LLOYD WEBBER Masquerade from “The Phantom of the Opera”
SONDHEIM Johanna (Act II) from “Sweeney Todd”
LLOYD WEBBER Love Changes Everything from “Aspects of Love”
SONDHEIM Send in the Clowns from “A Little Night Music”
LLOYD WEBBER All I Ask of You from “The Phantom of the Opera”
SONDHEIM Sweeney Todd Sequence from “Sweeney Todd”
LLOYD WEBBER Tell Me on a Sunday from “Song & Dance”
LLOYD WEBBER Starlight Sequence from “Starlight Express”
SONDHEIM Finishing the Hat from “Sunday in the Park with George”
LLOYD WEBBER As If We Never Said Goodbye from “Sunset Boulevard”
SONDHEIM No One Is Alone from “Into the Woods”
LLOYD WEBBER Beneath a Moonless Sky from “Love Never Dies”
SONDHEIM Children Will Listen from “Into the Woods”
LLOYD WEBBER And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out) from “Evita”

"Two Broadway giants. One unforgettable concert of drama, beauty, and song."

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim both transformed musical theater, but they often seemed to begin from opposite ends of the creative process.

For Webber, music is frequently the first great force. A melody arrives with enough emotional weight to carry an entire scene, sometimes before a character has fully explained what he or she is feeling. His scores are built on long arcs, recurring musical ideas, harmonic tension, and an instinctive understanding of how sound can enlarge a moment. A single phrase can return transformed — more urgent, more fragile, more dangerous — until it becomes part of the audience’s emotional memory.

That is one reason The Phantom of the Opera works so powerfully in purely musical terms. Beneath the spectacle is a score constructed from obsession. Themes circle back. Chords refuse to settle. Chromatic lines climb and tighten. The music continually blurs the boundary between seduction and threat. Even in All I Ask of You, one of Webber’s most openly lyrical songs, the apparent simplicity is carefully shaped: phrases expand, harmonies warm, and the duet gradually grows from intimate reassurance into something almost symphonic.

In Sunset Boulevard, Webber’s musical language becomes darker and more psychologically suspended. The glamour is still there, but it often feels unstable, as though the score itself understands that the world Norma Desmond inhabits has already disappeared. As If We Never Said Goodbye is not merely a grand return song. Its long, unfolding lines resist easy closure. The music keeps reaching forward, mirroring a character trying to step back into a past that cannot truly be recovered.

Sondheim approaches drama differently.

Where Webber often allows melody to reveal emotion before words can contain it, Sondheim places extraordinary pressure on language, rhythm, and musical structure. His characters think in music. They contradict themselves in music. They change their minds halfway through a phrase. Their songs are rarely pauses in the action; they are action.

Listen closely to Into the Woods and almost nothing is accidental. Repeated notes, short rhythmic cells, and fragments of melody pass from one character to another, creating a musical web in which private wishes become communal consequences. The score grows out of seemingly simple material, but Sondheim constantly reshapes it. Motives return with different meanings because the characters themselves have changed.

In Sweeney Todd, the machinery is even more intricate. The score draws on the Dies Irae, the centuries-old chant associated with death, while layering dense counterpoint, jagged rhythms, and recurring harmonic patterns. The result is a world that feels trapped in motion. Revenge does not simply drive the plot; it infects the musical architecture. Characters sing past one another, around one another, and sometimes directly against one another, each carrying a separate emotional truth at the same time.

That may be the clearest distinction between these two composers.

Webber often asks: How large can a feeling become?

Sondheim asks: How many conflicting truths can exist inside a single moment?

And yet their music meets in a crucial place: both composers understand that theatrical music must do more than decorate a story. It must reveal what ordinary speech cannot.

In Webber, that revelation may come through a melody that rises beyond the scale of the room. In Sondheim, it may come through a single unexpected rhyme, a fractured rhythm, or a harmony that exposes doubt beneath certainty. One composer often expands emotion outward; the other turns relentlessly inward.

Placed side by side, their music becomes more than a study in contrast. It reveals two fundamentally different ways of hearing human experience — the sweeping and the microscopic, the instinctive and the analytical, the dream and the reckoning.

And somewhere between those worlds lies the reason these songs endure.

There are some programs that are connected by a place, a period, or a particular musical style. This one is connected by something more fundamental: the way great composers create energy.

Both works on this program begin with relatively simple ideas and transform them into something far larger than their origins might suggest. Whether through conversation, development, or rhythmic momentum, Brahms and Beethoven demonstrate an extraordinary ability to take a single musical thought and allow it to grow into an entire musical world.