PASSING BY REVIEWS


BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE, Anthony Burton

Editor's Choice
As the starry cast list clearly suggests, the American Jake Heggie is something of a singer's composer. He sets thoughtfully chosen texts with maximum clarity, in lines which unfold expressively and even thrillingly above sympathetic accompaniments. He's also essentially an operatic composer. Here he creates two miniature scenas on monologues by Terrence McNally, dramatizes the conflict of mothers and daughters in the duet cycle Facing Forward/Looking Back, enlists the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay for a portrait of Ophelia, and devises a narrative linking settings of Housman and Vachel Lindsay for Here and Gone, for tenor, baritone and piano quartet ... Relative newcomers such as Isabel Bayrakdarian and Zheng Cao are by no means outclassed by the likes of Susan Graham and the ageless Frederica von Stade who are clearly revelling in the opportunities that Heggie has offered them here.


GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE, Edward Seckerson

Editor's Choice
Jake Heggie is the kind of composer that musical theatre — and I make no distinction between musicals and opera or indeed any other innately theatrical form — needs to embrace. It's not surprising that operas like Dead Man Walking or most recently Moby-Dick have found success and a distinctly broader audience on the other side of the Atlantic — because Heggie instinctively “gets” the music of words and through melody (that still much maligned enchantress) carries the emotional memory of a moment, a connection, a feeling, forward ... I can do scant justice to this collection in the space permitted but suffice it to say that these songs “sing” most ardently. Heggie is not afraid to acknowledge, indeed embrace, America's Broadway heritage in the way his tunes “hook” us — be it in an isolated phrase or a longer line — but he displays at all times a really composerly instinct in the way these songs are structured.


THE CLASSICAL REVIEW, John von Rhein

Jake Heggie appears to have assumed Ned Rorem's mantle as the finest American art song composer of his generation. He is a natural and winning melodist whose sweetly diatonic vocal lines rest atop simple but never simplistic accompaniments — here, piano and strings. What's more, he writes expertly for the voice (women's voices in particular), while his choice of poetry — the range here extends from AE Housman and Rainer Maria Rilke to Vachel Lindsay and Edna St. Vincent Millay — shows a discerning sensibility. Yes, sentiment flows freely in these songs, but Heggie rarely descends to sentimentality ... With singers as splendid as Avie's roster (several of whom are Heggie “regulars”) and with the composer's authoritative accompaniments at the piano, admirers of contemporary American song have much to savor.


THE CLASSICAL REVIEW, Michael Quinn

#2 of the 10 Best Recordings of 2010
An altogether astonishing compendium of piano- and strings—accompanied songs and song cycles composed over the past two decades has cemented Jake Heggie's position as “the finest American art song composer of his generation.” Reflecting on lovers, family and friends, each is a miniature marvel superbly delivered by a stellar roster of singers — Susan Graham, Joyce DiDonato and Frederica von Stade among them — with the composer himself at the piano.