Britten, Stravinsky, and Sweeney Todd
Music as drama
In 2009, Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press asked Stephen Sondheim what attracted him to the music of Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky. Sondheim’s response revealed as much about his own artistic sensibilities as the music that moved him:
Their theatricality and harmonic language. Britten is more tonal, more modal. But Britten spikes it. There’s …