
Edward Seckerson
Writer and broadcaster Edward Seckerson is chief classical music and opera critic for The Independent. He wrote and presented the long-running BBC Radio 3 series Stage & Screen, in which he interviewed many of the most prominent writers and stars of musical theatre. He appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4. On television, he has commentated a number of times at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. He has published books on Mahler and the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, and has been on Gramophone Magazine's review panel for many years. Edward presented the 2007 series of the Radio 4 music quiz Counterpoint. He has interviewed everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Liza Minelli; from Paul McCartney to Pavarotti: from Julie Andrews to Jessye Norman.

Rarely do the arrangers and orchestrators of stage musicals get their dues in print. Until relatively recently there wasn't even a category for them in the annual Broadway Tony Awards. So here's something for Sarah Travis, the arranger and supervisor of the latest import from the miniscule Watermill Theatre at Newbury where the only way to stage musicals at all is to have the cast double as the band. We've seen and heard several examples of her cunning reductionism - most notably the John Doyle directed Sweeney Todd - but this latest incarnation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's best score (well, I for one am certain of it), Sunset Boulevard, is arguably the most successful. If anything her ingenious instrumentation intensifies the sepia, other-worldly quality of ALW's music, lending the key themes a more fragile ephemeral quality. Even the show's most cinemascopic moment - the moment Norma Desmond returns to the studio and is hurled into the spotlight once more - creates the illusion of opulence from only a handful of instruments, the harmony at one point transfixed by a single violin sustained above the stave. That moment, incidentally, magnifies the great song in the show - the stonking "With One Look" - and achieves an emotional uplift that few other Lloyd Webber tunes manage to quite the same degree. As Norma Desmond herself says (and Kathryn Evans is a whisker away from turning herself into a durable stage diva this time around) "I am big. It's the movies that have gotten smaller". So have the shows - but nobody appears to have told Sarah Travis. Good on her.
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