After nearly 100K views in its first 24 hours on Twitter, this fan video (origin unknown) shows the moment Raul Esparza spontaneously sprang out of the audience on a summer night during Melissa’s sold-out closing night performance in Provincetown at The Art House - to bring to life a memory of the two costars who played Georges & Dot in “Sunday In The Park With George” at The Kennedy Center.
•
•
Mark Cortale presents Seth Rudetsky & Melissa Errico on August 9-11, 2023
BANDS IN TOWN EVENT:
After her triumphant visit to Paris in June, where in company with Isabelle Georges she dazzled for an hour on nationwide French radio, Melissa Errico paid her first visit to the Paris of the North, Montreal. Opening for George Benson at the legendary Salle Wilfred Pelletier, before 8000 people, Melissa won a permanent place in the hearts of Montrealers by showing off her easy proficiency in spoken French… and more important, her dazzling proficiency in French music, landing an inspired set dominated by the music of her mentor, Michel Legrand. As a knocked-out writer from London Jazz News wrote: “Errico was energized, making sure with every breath that she would get the audience in the 8000-seater Pelletier really on her side. Every high note was heroically held, and she got a standing ovation from this audience. Montreal audiences always want to show their warmth and this one made her deservedly welcome.” Added the Quebec Journal, in its review of the show, "It was the Italian-American chanteuse Melissa Errico who was responsible for energizing the concert hall, and that she did, expressing herself as fluently in French as in English, and offering a memorable reprise of Legrand's "Valse des Lilas/Once Upon A Summertime."
In November 2023, Melissa will release “Sondheim in The City.”
“The finest all-Sondheim album ever recorded, “was the Wall Street Journal’s verdict on Melissa Errico’s ecstatic, inward-turning “Sondheim Sublime” (released in 2018.) Now, her new tribute to Broadway’s greatest songwriter “Sondheim In The City”, changes tone to offer us a more outward-driven,kaleidoscopic street fair of New York scenes and moments - summoning back to life the poetic vision of a man who once confessed that his entire creative life had been spent in a twenty-block radius of Manhattan.
From the wide-eyed newly-wed for whom a basement room with a quarter inch view is all that she needs, to the cynical nouveau from New Rochelle who can’t choose between uptown & downtown for her bitter pleasures, Melissa, joined by the inimitable pianist Tedd Firth and an all-star collection of jazzmen, celebrates and embodies New York characters of all kinds - with a clear arc of passage along the way. Beginning in innocence (“All That I Need” and “Another Hundred People”) passing into experience (“Sorry, Grateful”, “Everybody Says Don’t”) and ending in the plaintive, bittersweet ambivalence that is Sondheim’s tonic note and which Melissa’s lands’ better than any singer alive (“Good Thing Going”, “Anyone Can Whistle”), the stories of New York lives, lives here.
Produced by Rob Mathes (Sting, Elvis Costello) and featuring Lewis Nash on drums and David Finck on bass, “Sondheim In The City” is the second in a planned triptych of tributes to Melissa’s musical mentor. As the city awakens from the pandemic, here is Melissa singing New York as it was, might still be, and will yet become, through the music of one of its most enduring poets.
Melissa will continue on with George Benson during his summer 2024 UK Tour.
melissaerrico.com