Search - Maria Friedman :: Now & Then

Maria Friedman isn't as well known in America as in her homebase of England, but her stateside fanbase can only grow with this appealing album. Friedman is one of the U.K.'s most-prominent interpreters of Sondheim, and he returns the favor by backing her up on the piano on this CD's last track, his own "Children and Art" (from Sunday in the Park with George, which is also represented with "Finishing the Hat"). Before getting to that song, though, Friedman has been through a well-balanced selection culled from the American Songbook (Cole Porter's "I Happen to Like New York," Rodgers & Hart's "My Romance," Arlen & Gershwin's "The Man Who Got Away") and less-obvious sources such as Kate Bush ("The Man with the Child in His Eyes"), Cora Vaucaire ("Paris in the Rain"), Michel Legrand (the title track), and the anonymous author of 1941's "In the Sky," a young boy from the Vilna ghetto. It's hard to shake a certain mood of reflectiveness?-Friedman mentions in her liner notes the fact that she was diagnosed with breast cancer during the Broadway previews of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White?-but the singer always balances melancholy with a sense of indomitable spirit. --Elisabeth Vincentelli