Verdict: "A modern art song recital with glimmers of Broadway in the wings."
Jake Heggie is not afraid of those good old majors and minors. Jake Heggie may be a household name in operatically inclined households. His 2000 Dead Man Walking brought an electric chair on to the stage and provided the perfect vehicle for Teddy Tahu Rhodes to flaunt his abs.
Heggie's latest opera, Moby-Dick, premiered in Dallas last May, also had New Zealand connections with Jonathan Lemalu in the role of Queequeg.
This composer is not afraid of those good old majors and minors with a style not so far from Thinking Person's Broadway.
But when his first disc of songs, the 1999 The Faces of Love, featured the likes of Renee Fleming, Jennifer Larmore, Carol Vaness and Frederica von Stade, who's to argue?
Heggie's new Passing By offers another selection of songs that tell stories about now and then.
"People who entered our lives and would be there forever," as the composer puts it, "then suddenly were not there at all."
The diva roll here includes Susan Graham, Joyce DiDonato and von Stade, with the composer providing definitive accompaniments.
Susan Graham opens with A Lucky Child, a slice of nostalgia from a larger solo work in the tradition of Poulenc's La Voix Humaine and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with Heggie's idiom making the older composers seem positively radical.
Joyce DiDonato rounds the disc off with the final, poignant monologue from Terrence McNally's Master Class, a baring of the soul that just occasionally calls out for a soaring Richard Rodgers line. Among lighter delights are Zheng Cao tackling Heggie's setting of Raymond Carver's The Minuet with snappypiano trio and playful reminiscences of Paderewski's notorious Minuet.
Two sequences of duets probe more deeply. Facing Forward/Looking Back focuses on mother-daughter dynamics through various poems with Graham and von Stade lapping up the astringent habanera of Armistead Maupin's Mother in the Mirror.
A.E. Housman and Vachel Lindsay provide the poems for Here and Gone, sung by Paul Groves and Keith Phares. Groves' lyrical tenor, combined with piano quartet, transforms Stars into a tinkling, twinkling beauty, while Sondheim himself could not better the swerve and crunch of The Factory Window Song.
