The Listener’s Gallery legend. One of them is Dean Jones’s riveting performance of the show’s great anthem “Being Alive,” in which the central character of Bobby finally begins to break through the curtain of uncertainty that has held him back from pursuing a serious or meaningful relationship, finally realizing that the pain, frustration, and unpredictability of it all are essential to being fully human. In one of the commentaries, Sondheim pronounces that Jones never sang this incredible song any better than he sang it on this occasion. The other legendary performance captured in this film was not the same sort of triumph. The brilliant but erratic Elaine Stritch agreed to switch places in the schedule with Dean Jones, meaning that her towering solo “The Ladies who lunch” would be recorded at the very end of the recording session. It was not until three in the morning that Stritch finally stood before the microphones to begin this fiercely demanding song with a voice that by then sounded like battered leather. Take after take is attempted, but Stritch’s voice and energy are not up to the challenge. The ordeal occupies about ten minutes time toward the end of the film, but it feels like it goes on for hours on end. Pennebaker said later that he was astonished at the time that the producers in the booth, as well as Sondheim himself, were so displeased by what appeared to him to be one riveting performance after another. He was forgetting that the producers were making an audio-only recording, and Stritch’s raw and even painful vocalism was simply unacceptable for such a document. It is an extraordinary bit of drama that ends only when the decision is made to lay down an orchestral track to which Stritch’s vocals will be added when she is up to the challenge. (One might May/June 2022
wonder why they didn’t think of it much earlier, but we are viewing this from a world in which instantaneous cutting and pasting is ridiculously easy. A half century ago, it was not so common or so easily done.) In a triumphant coda to the film, we get to see and hear Stritch’s soaring performance from two days later, her voice restored to its radiant glory. Criterion’s edition presents Pennebaker’s film in remastered splendor. There are commentary tracks with Pennebaker, Sondheim, stage director Hal Prince, and Elaine Stritch. Just as interesting is a prerecorded dual interview with Sondheim and his frequent collaborator Jonathan Tunick, as well as an additional conversation between Tunick and Ted Chapin, who managed to be present in the recording studio to witness most of what unfolded back in 1970. These conversations offer up a plethora of fascinating insights on the role that the orchestra plays in a show like Company and on the challenges of orchestration. On a lighter note, the release also includes Original Cast Album: Co-op, a spoof of Pennebaker’s film written by John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, which was an episode of the mock-documentary series Documentary Now! There is also a zoom interview with its cast in which they talk about their affection for Pennebaker’s original film. All in all, this Criterion release more than lives up to the label’s reputation for exceptional attention to detail as well as the highest standards of technical quality. They have treated this one of a kind documentary with the loving care that it fully merits.
STILLED VOICES Of the singers we lost in 2021, none was more beloved or important than BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
the great Christa Ludwig (1928– 2021), whose remarkable onstage career began with her opera debut in 1946 (as Orlofsky) and ended with a final Klytemnestra at the Vienna State Opera in 1994. For nearly half a century, Ludwig graced opera, recital, and concert stages around the world with her warm, luscious voice and incomparable artistry, collaborating with all of the finest singers and conductors of her time. This writer will never forget the priceless experience of witnessing her performance of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Ravinia Festival in the summer of 1991. As the final sounds of “Der Leiermann” faded away, the audience remained transfixed in silence for more than a minute. It was as though the world had stopped spinning on its axis, and we did not want anything to interrupt that blessed stillness. There are very few singers capable of casting that kind of spell on an audience. Ludwig was one of them. Your columnist wrote these words over a dozen years ago: In his book Opera People, Robert Jacobson called Christa Ludwig “the Earth-Mother of all singers” and the moniker was fitting in every possible way. There was the arresting beauty of the sound itself, from its opulent depths to his radiant heights. There was the reassuring strength of her technique, which allowed her to sing with ease and utter security. There was the intense expressiveness of her singing, wed to a disarming simplicity and directness which set her apart from some of her famous contemporaries. That lack of pretentiousness was a hallmark of her offstage personality as well, for which she was adored by fans and colleagues alike. In short, Christa Ludwig was everything that a professional singer should be, and the fact that she was able to sing for so long with such excellence is perhaps the highest tribute of all (“The
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