“The finest all-Sondheim album ever recorded,” was The Wall Street Journal’s verdict on Melissa Errico’s ecstatic, inward-turning Sondheim Sublime (released in 2018). Now, her new tribute to Broadway’s greatest songwriter, Sondheim In The City, changes tone to offer us a more outward-driven, kaleidoscopic street fair of New York scenes and moments – summoning back to life the poetic vision of a man who once confessed that his entire creative life had been spent in a twenty-block radius of Manhattan.

From the wide-eyed newly-wed for whom a basement room with a quarter-inch view is all that she needs, to the cynical nouveau from New Rochelle who can’t choose between uptown and downtown for her bitter pleasures, Melissa celebrates and embodies New York characters of all kinds – with a clear arc of passage along the way: Beginning in innocence (“What More Do I Need?” and “Another Hundred People”) passing into experience (“The Little Things You Do Together”, “Everybody Says Don’t”) and arriving at the plaintive, bittersweet ambivalence that is Sondheim’s tonic note on “Good Thing Going” and “Sorry-Grateful.” In the very end we rise, in a driving, deeply emotional, and redemptive version of “Being Alive”, to some kind of broken-hearted, Sondheimian hope.

Joined by the inimitable pianist Tedd Firth, the recording was produced by Rob Mathes (Sting, Elvis Costello) and features Lewis Nash on drums, David Finck on bass — plus strings & horns. Sondheim In The City is Melissa singing New York as it was, might still be, and will yet become, through the words and music of one of its most enduring poets.