San Francisco Classical Voice

Discussions about Jake Heggie's music often take on a heated tone. You need only mention his upcoming premiere at the San Francisco Opera to start the debate rolling. He is a composer whose music pleases the general audience. To some this will ingratiate him as a "people's" composer. Others will see him as catering to the lowest common denominator. "Faces of Love," an all-Heggie concert presented by San Francisco Performances on Wednesday, included over 20 of his songs (most grouped in sets of several pieces) and a scene from his upcoming opera. Heggie was the pianist throughout the evening, accompanying vocalists Zheng Cao, Kristin Clayton, Nicolle Foland, and Frederica von Stade as well as cellist Emil Miland.

It is easy to understand why a set of songs by Jake Heggie would be a welcome addition to most vocal recitals. From folk song settings to original songs and opera, his works demonstrate a lightness of intent, a sense of humor, and easily understood dramatic touches. These same qualities, when presented in a two-hour stretch, also demonstrate the music's weakness when compared to other art song composers of recent years. The question is, however, whether that is the right comparison to make. The answer is no. Comparison to composers like Rorem and Barber is unfair, to those composers as well as to Heggie. His starting point is not these "classical" composers, but composers more similar to Bernstein and Sondheim.

The program opened with Three Folk Songs sung by von Stade. The set was written for her and takes great advantage of her warm lower register. The first two pieces, "Bab'ry Allen" and "He's Gone Away," use textbook early 20th century tonal harmonic practice, from polytonality to parallel harmony, quintal chords, and extended triads. The sudden changes from one technique to another sometimes detracted from an otherwise-pleasant song group.

The two songs comprising Before the Storm, for voice and cello, were among the least distinctive on the program. Although they were performed with simple elegance by Zheng Cao and Emil Miland, I could not help but be distracted by the simplistic cello writing, which would have seemed out of place even in a good Broadway show.

At first I thought the three selections from Heggie's Eve-Song were a spoof of 1970s musicals. Simple repeated chords and wailing vocals made "Listen" resemble a torch song. The sexy vocal setting of "Snake" could have been a takeoff on bits of "Chicago." But there were no comic intentions in the final song, "Woe to Man," which left me wondering if the whole work was intended as a sincere (albeit misguided) setting.

A set of pieces called Natural Selection, written just three years ago, was the first to show a sense of structure beyond individual songs, with fragments of one song appearing again in another. But the intrusion of comic tango sections or an occasional blatant harmonic progression did not stretch the boundaries of the cycle as Heggie may have wished. Instead, they created awkward crevasses in its cohesion.

The second half of the program opened with a scene from Heggie's soon-to-be-premiered opera, Dead Man Walking. Positive and negative traits heard in the evening's songs were also present in the opera scene. The text setting was very clear (I didn't have to look at the provided text at any point in the evening), a harmonic motif of expanding intervals was overused (this might not have seemed the case if the same motif had not been presented in Natural Selection), and pregnant pauses abounded. The overall mood was darker and more serious than in his songs. Here the bit of humor at the end of the scene was welcome.

The three songs presented from Faces of Love were a disappointment. There was never a sense of expectation created and thwarted -- all was predictable. For most composers, combining a song written 13 years ago (the first song of this set) with one written two years ago (the last of the three songs) would be awkward. The fact that there was no dichotomy here was not necessarily a good sign. It may be an indicator of how little Heggie's music has progressed over the last ten years.

By the time the longest cycle, Songs to the Moon, was presented, followed by the final piece, "My True Love Hath My Heart," I was overcome with the evening's sameness. Despite the superficial shifts in style and technique, the evening as a whole was monochromatic in its facile underpinnings. The grace was not well balanced by grit. And the sense of improvisation seldom seemed grounded in careful thought or planning.

(Ronald Caltabiano is a composer living in San Francisco and teaching at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Ronald Caltabiano, all rights reserved