Labor Day is officially on the horizon, and here on the East End it has been a season filled with the sunny sights and sounds of summer. But as evenings noticeably shorten, the weather grows more intense and the mood shifts subtly — thoughts of introspection and reflection emerge as we sense the turning of the planet (and the leaves) and settle in for shorter days ahead.

Contradictory emotions, like those inherent in the changing of the seasons, are something that Broadway singer and actress Melissa Errico understands well. As one of the preeminent interpreters of the music of late, great composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, she recognizes the paradoxes in the human condition that Sondheim so eloquently embraced.

“Sondheim is full of contradictions,” she said. “None of us is simple — we’re all made up of contradictions, we’re either hopeful or falling to pieces.”

Sondheim died in November 2021 at age 91, and Errico compares the depths of his musical insight to psychoanalysis of the 1960s or 1970s. If he had written “Oklahoma,” she quipped in a recent phone interview, his version of the opening number might have gone, “Oh what a beautiful morning (after a terrible night).”

“Historians of musical theater will argue about Sondheim’s place for decades. For me, as a performer — and ,yes, writer, too — the great leap was the way he allowed ambivalent and complicated emotion into the life of the American musical theater,” she explained. “I call it the ‘Sondheim Comma’ — the way he always asserts one emotion and then its opposite. ‘Marry Me, a Little,’ ‘Sorry, Grateful,’ ‘Good Thing, Going.’

“You even saw the comma in the twisted, ironic expression on his face,” she added. “The songs are always turning in on themselves, offering new complexities of feeling. That’s why we never come to the end of Sondheim’s art.”