A Conversation with Tedd Firth
Accompanying Bernadette Peters, arranging Sondheim for Melissa Errico, and more...
I’m so pleased to share our conversation with musical director, pianist and arranger Tedd Firth today. Tedd regularly works with performers including Bernadette Peters, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marilyn Maye, and Melissa Errico (whose Sondheim Hub conversation you can read by clicking here). He was also MD for the 2014 Into the Woods original cast reunion, appearing on stage alongside Sondheim, Lapine, and seven original cast members. We spoke about all this and more, and our conversation begins below:
It’s really great to meet you. There are so many strings to your bow that it’s difficult to know where to begin! But I’ve been listening to Melissa Errico’s wonderful Sondheim in the City disc so much recently, which you of course played a big part in. How about we start there? I’d love to know from your point of view how a project like that unfolds, and what the creative process is like.
Sure. Well, with the Sondheim in the City record, we had initially started talking about making it as far back as the spring of 2022. We wound up recording it in the summer of 2023, so about a year ago. Rob Mathes is an extraordinary musician, so I was really pleased that Melissa wanted him to produce Sondheim in the City. She reached out to both myself and Rob, and she had a pretty good idea of the songs she wanted to include. Some of them we had performed before. We had been doing “Another Hundred People” in concert, but it wasn't the version that wound up on the record. That's Rob's arrangement. When the list of songs was determined, I think Rob said, “Look, I'd like to arrange these songs, and Tedd, would you arrange these?” And then I pretty much did just go off on my own. They gave me free rein.
There was an initial session where we got together and we played through the songs, just to figure out what keys worked for Melissa. Both Rob and I had an idea of what we wanted to do with the songs. Especially with something like “Another Hundred People,” the accompaniment figure for that from the show is very well-known, and it's so well-suited to the song—and Rob wanted to acknowledge that without replicating it. And then I remember maybe two weeks before the recording sessions, Rob and I met Melissa and showed her the stuff that we had. I don't think there was too much revision at that point. I know that both Rob and I wanted to go and maybe fine-tune some things, but I don't think anything was radically reimagined after that session.
Is there an arrangement of yours on that disc that you're particularly proud of, or perhaps that went in a slightly different direction than you expected it to?
Well, the one that I found the most challenging was “What More Do I Need?” It's a great song, and it’s perfect for the Sondheim in the City theme, of course. The imagery is so good in it. It's got such a cool accompaniment pattern that starts off with that discordant thing in a high register, and then when it gets into the main body of the song, the accompaniment becomes much more conventional. In fact, for Sondheim in particular, it's extremely conventional, because he didn't write very many conventional accompaniments. We knew with this record, we wanted some of it to sound like jazz, and to actually be a jazz record in a way. So we brought in one of the world's great jazz drummers, a guy named Lewis Nash, who I had never had a chance to work with but I’d wanted to for years. But with “What More Do I Need?” at that initial session, both Rob and I realized that when it got to that part of the accompaniment, it was a more conventional show tune feel, and we just wanted something else there. Neither of us could say exactly what, but we just felt like we wanted something different. Something surprising.
So I was kicking this around, and I think it was about six weeks from that session to when we met again to show Melissa what we'd come up with. I think about five weeks had gone by, and I had nothing. The well was dry. I tried a few different things. I think one of them was some sort of Latin feel or something like that. But I just remember that whatever I tried, when I got done messing with it, it just felt like it didn't work, and I was getting really frustrated.
Well, I was rehearsing with Alex Gemignani around that time for a concert, and after we left the rehearsal studio, I was venting my problems out loud. And I said, “I don’t know what to do with “What More Do I Need?” But we're bringing in this world-class jazz drummer, and we definitely want to show this guy off. What can I do?” And Alex said, “Well, just make it a feature for him.” So then I thought, “Well, what if it was like a conventional piano trio kind of thing, but where instead of the rhythm section playing time throughout, that at the top, the piano and bass would be playing kicks, and then the drums would almost be soloing around that with the melody?” And once I came up with that idea, it just fell into place. I just sat down and started figuring out some basic ideas, and maybe an hour later it was done. So that was definitely the most challenging one!
The others were a little more conventional in how I came up with them. The songs themselves are pretty informative. I wanted “Uptown, Downtown” to sound like early Ellington, like the Ellington of the 1930s. That's why you have all the plunger trumpet on that. And then with “Can That Boy Foxtrot!” also being from Follies, having more or less a 1930s feel felt right there as well. And they're both underperformed songs as well. They're not as well-known.
And that's one of the great things about that disc in general, isn't it? There are more familiar tracks, but so many of us won’t necessarily have come across, say, “Dawn” before.
Yeah, absolutely.
I’d love to know more about your musical background. Jazz is clearly very important to you, and classical repertoire too. How did Sondheim fit into your musical world when you were growing up, studying, and then entering the profession?
It's funny, I was actually thinking about this earlier in terms of what we might talk about. And I was trying to think, when was I even aware of who Stephen Sondheim was? I grew up in upstate New York in a small town. My parents were music teachers, so there was always music in the house. I started playing piano when I was five, took lessons all through high school. I started playing jazz piano when I was in high school, and I went to college as a jazz piano major. I went to Manhattan School of Music, and during grad school I found myself working with a lot of singers, and that was what got me going down the road of working as an accompanist primarily. But as far as the earliest awareness of Sondheim goes, my grandparents lived on Long Island and we would go down there every Christmas. And the earliest thing I can remember was listening to one of the stations out of New York, maybe WCBS or something like that, and there was an ad for Into the Woods on the radio. It sounded like a cool thing, this reimagining of these fairy tales.
And that was right around the time I was becoming aware of musical theatre in general. The first musicals I saw were Andrew Lloyd Webber things, like Starlight Express and Cats. And then a few years later, when I was a freshman in high school, the high school that I went to in Hudson Falls, NY was one of the first schools in the country to to get a license to perform Into the Woods. I was playing a lot of piano then, but I really wasn't sure where I was going to land musically. And I thought maybe I wanted to actually be in the show. I went to audition and I worked up “Giants in the Sky,” but on the night that they were going to have the auditions, I chickened out. I didn't go. I just felt like I couldn't do it. I went and saw the production, and I think it was good for a high school production. But that was when I really got to know some of the music at least, by preparing for that audition that I wound up not doing. So that was probably the earliest awareness I had of Sondheim's music.
And then probably through high school and through college, I didn't have much interaction with it because I wasn't really involved in a lot of theatre stuff. I was focusing mainly on playing jazz piano, and so that's what I did all through college. But when I was in grad school and when I got out of grad school, I was playing with a lot of singers, and I was playing at an open mic on Sunday afternoons. It was primarily jazz singers, but then sometimes people would bring in theater music and things like that, and I always liked playing lots of different kinds of things. Even though I played a lot of jazz piano, I played a lot of classical piano even through college as well. And so the theater music, I enjoyed that as well. And the Sondheim stuff that I was being shown… Somebody brought in something from Follies. It was something like “The Road You Didn't Take.” And I remember playing through it and finding it, one, challenging to play, and two, fun to play, and enjoying the music and thinking, “Wow, this is very cool stuff.” But I never played in pits and things like that, so it was a very tangential relationship with the music. When it was brought to me and I would play it, I enjoyed it, but it also wasn't the main thrust of what I was doing professionally. But that's how I came to know it.
And then I started to develop these relationships playing for singers that came from the theater world, and found myself playing more and more of that kind of music and enjoying it. And it's interesting: with Sondheim's music, what's on the page is so specific. It's completely ready to go. It is complete. The guy was incredibly meticulous and exact about what he wanted. But there are also these songs where he was writing in a little bit more of a traditional mold, like “Losing My Mind,” which is a traditional 32-bar song. Isn’t that the one that was modeled after “The Man I Love?
It is, yeah.
Yeah. You can totally see the parallels with it. And of course, things like Gershwin's songs for jazz musicians, especially if you're playing for singers, you're playing songs like that constantly. So something like “Losing My Mind” I could really relate to as a jazz musician. I handle everything with what I do with his music on a case-by-case basis. Some of it I just leave alone. A song like “The Miller’s Son” or something like that, that accompaniment is so perfect, and it doesn't need me to fuss around with it or anything like that. Just play it. Play it as it is. But then other things—and of course on Melissa's records and other projects like that, we really lean into this—there's so much room for leaving the melody and lyric intact and then seeing where you can take it other places, as far as the accompaniment goes, and the orchestration and all that kind of stuff.
As you're talking, I'm imagining these songs almost as physical objects, where some of them are really intricate and almost can’t be disturbed, and then others are much more malleable, much more elastic.
Yeah, and there's a middle ground too—but it's a small middle ground. I find with most of them, I'm either going to come at it my own way or I'm just going to leave it the way he wrote it and not touch it. I definitely treat it very much on a case by case basis.
You mentioned Into the Woods being your introduction to Sondheim’s work, and of course you now regularly work with the original Witch herself, Bernadette Peters. How did that professional relationship begin?
I first met Bernadette about 15 years ago or so. Her tour manager is also the tour manager for Brian Stokes Mitchell, and I've worked with Stokes for about 17 years. For a number of years, Bernadette's concerts were always with a 30-piece orchestra. She would carry her musical director, a guy named Marvin Laird, an outstanding musician, and a bass player and a drummer. She's had the same bass player for a number of years, a guy named Kevin Axt, who's based in Los Angeles. She's had the same drummer too, a guy named Cubby O'Brien, who's based out of Eugene, Oregon. Cubby’s worked with her for a long time as well, probably over 30 years. And so she carries the three, and then she would pick up the rest of the orchestra in whatever city she was in.
And when she was in the New York area, Marvin would like to stock the orchestra with players from New York that he knew, so he would request a specific lead trumpet player, maybe some of the reed players and that kind of thing. Well, there was a concert in New Jersey about 15 years ago. And Bernadette's tour manager, a guy named Michael Flowers, said to Marvin, “Hey, Brian Stokes Mitchell is working with this piano player, a guy named Ted Firth. Would you want to use him as the orchestra piano player?” So Marvin would conduct most of the time, but whenever there was any exposed piano-vocal stuff, Marvin would get off the podium. The orchestra piano player gets up and Marvin would play the more involved piano-vocal stuff. I did this for a concert, and that's probably when I met Bernadette. But it was probably just one of the things where I was introduced, we said hi, and that was probably about it. I was just a player in the orchestra. And I think I did maybe two or three of those between 2008 and 2012. Every once in a while she'd have a concert in New York, I'd play, and we'd say hi. That was it.
But it was the Into the Woods cast reunion concerts where I really got to know her, and those happened about 10 years ago. A theater producer in Los Angeles, a woman named Eileen Roberts, got this idea to have a concert where she would get seven of the original cast members of Into the Woods, and she would also get Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine to be on stage. There would be interviews with all the cast members, and of course with Steve and James, and there would be music. The cast members were Bernadette, Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason, Robert Westenberg, Kim Crosby, Danielle Ferland, and Ben Wright.
I remember Michael Flowers, Bernadette's tour manager, calling me out of the blue one day. He said, “Look, I've been in touch with this theater producer in Los Angeles who wants to do this Into the Woods cast reunion concert. And she's going to probably get in touch with you because I recommended you for this, because they need a musical director.” So she reached out and explained what the idea was. I said, “Well, that sounds amazing.” I said, “How big is the band?” She said, “One. Just you.”
So I'm thinking, “All right, I guess I can play this stuff alone. I've played other Sondheim stuff solo. Why not?” She got everybody on board and we did the concert at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. We did two performances on the same day. And it was the closest thing to a rock concert that I've ever been a part of. The fan base for that show is dedicated. They came out, and it was a blast. It was unbelievable. And the reception that Bernadette got… Like I said, I've never heard anything like that. It was amazing. And then we did it again maybe six months later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and the reception was even more over-the-top.
And besides Bernadette, I didn't know any of the cast members. I'd never worked with any of them. And so leading up to it, I just emailed them and introduced myself and said, “Hey, we're going to be working together on this. Would you like to get together and play through your songs?” Everybody was super friendly and easy to work with, and very into the project. But I remember thinking, it’s been 27 years since the original production of it. And the 11 o’clock moment of the whole concert was going to be the entire cast doing “Your Fault” leading into “Last Midnight.” And I remember thinking, with “Your Fault,” there’s all that back and forth. The lines ricochet off of each other. And it's brilliant, but it's hard. And I remember thinking, they haven't done this in 27 years, so I made all these rehearsal demos and stuff like that. And then the first time we all got together, I think it was two days before the concert, everybody flew out to California to rehearse for a day. And they fell into it like not a day had gone by. It was unbelievable. And then what Bernadette did with “Last Midnight…” I remember thinking, this is otherworldly.
I’m fascinated by what it’s like to accompany performers for whom the music you’re playing was written—and in Bernadette’s case, she’s so deeply associated with so much of Sondheim’s work. There’s an authority, and perhaps a freedom, that comes with that. Does that affect your role as accompanist at all?
Yeah. There's a spot in “Losing my Mind…” Bernadette does “Losing my Mind” in every concert, and there's a spot where I always have to wait. It's coming out of the first bridge, “Not going left, not going right…” Some nights she'll take a lot of time there. Now, of course, the second time that happens, there’s the key change, so that's its own special case. But that first one coming out of the bridge, sometimes we'll take a lot of time there and sometimes we won't. And I'm always fascinated, because I'm always on alert that we’re going to have to be flexible there. Some performers don't take those chances and they don't take those liberties. And that's fine if you don't, but I love that she does. It means that we all have to really be there, and I love that. There are many things to love about what she does, but for me as an accompanist, those are particularly cool.