“It’s a Wonderful Life” just might be the opera we need right now. After a year of devastating fires, mass shootings, political turmoil and paralyzing uncertainty, Jake Heggie’s opera has arrived at the War Memorial Opera House with a simple, uplifting message: “no one is a failure who has friends.”
“Out of Darkness” is a brilliant, haunting watershed for the Atlanta Opera
Opera Forces Two Survivors to Remember
Atlanta Opera General and Artistic Director Tomer Zvulun said that dealing with the emotional intensity of the piece has been challenging and rewarding. “You see how powerful it is, how poignant.“
Jake Heggie’s Masterwork Soars In Solid Production
The operatic version [of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick”] manages to condense the book’s sprawling action into 2 1/2 hours without compromising the essential elements or the emotional power of the original.
Santa Fe Opera ascends with Jennifer Higdon's "Cold Mountain"
The odyssey of the battle-scarred warrior making his precarious way back to a lover waiting at home is the oldest story in Western literature — the stuff of epic poems, plays, novels, movies and many operas. So it is a delight to report that the newest manifestation of this oft-told tale — the opera version of the best-selling novel “Cold Mountain,” just given its world premiere in Santa Fe — captures all of its adventure, romance and pathos in a fresh, vibrant musical idiom.
Cold Mountain reviewed by the Denver Post
...that gives Scheer a big spotlight. Words matter in "Cold Mountain" and he is alternately sparse and poetic, and always on point as his characters suffer greatly from their lost conflict and evolve as humans. They sing: Some borders can't be crossed, Some wounds will never heal, Some things you can't forget, Hearts buried beneath regret, In the end, how will I feel? Who you are the war reveals.
European premiere of Jake Heggie's song cycle based on Camille Claudel
. . . Camille Claudel: Into the Fire . . . six songs each of which depict a different one of Camille Claudel's moods in the insane asylum and in the last song she is visited by her friend Jessie Lipscomb with whom she shared a studio many years earlier. All this is poignant and touching stuff, with three of the songs depicting the way Camille Claudel's mind wanders.Reviewed: Joyce di Donato's performance of Into the Fire at the Barbican in London
Joyce DiDonato/Brentano Quartet, Zankel Hall, New York — review – FT.com
The climactic finale involved the local premiere of Jake Heggie’s Camille Claudel: Into the Fire (2011), an extensive ode to the agonised sculptor — Rodin’s lover — who died in 1943. Ever popular, obviously facile and increasingly daring, Heggie dealt sensitively with the introspective sentiments at hand. He juggled acerbic lyricism craftily with oppressive drama, adorning Gene Scheer’s text with florid wails and eerie melismas at jolting intervals. In the process, he made the primitive lamentations propulsive, the otherworldly illusions, delusions and allusions gripping. DiDonato sang the expansive solos with rare conviction and lustrous, subtly shaded tone.
Joyce DiDonato Celebrates Camille Claudel at Zankel Hall – NYTimes.com
The life of the French sculptor Camille Claudel is a tangle of art, passion, madness and betrayal. A student and lover of Rodin’s, Claudel was a critically acclaimed artist when she began to show signs of mental distress, which led her family to commit her to an institution, where she spent the remaining 30 years of her life. On Thursday at Zankel Hall, the incandescent mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato presented the New York premiere of Jake Heggie’s “Camille Claudel: Into the Fire.” Set for voice and string quartet, the work compresses a tragic life of operatic dimensions into a song cycle of great beauty and emotional resonance.
Tragedy Makes for the Peak of Drama
‘Everest,” a remarkable first opera by the British composer Joby Talbot, which had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera on Friday, forges art from a contemporary tragedy. Based on the true story of three climbers trapped on Mount Everest in a blizzard in May 1996 (the expedition that was chronicled by Jon Krakauer in “Into Thin Air”), this 70-minute juggernaut makes you feel disturbingly in the moment, living—and dying—along with the characters. Gene Scheer’s taut, streamlined libretto, drawn from interviews with survivors, focuses on two situations: Rob Hall (the expedition leader) and Doug Hansen push on to the summit even though Doug is unwell, and Beck Weathers stays behind and gets lost. The fragmentation of the narrative builds suspense, and the stories are welded together by a chorus that echoes and questions the climbers.