On Monday night, Heggie and a circle of extremely gifted friends and colleagues capped Temple Emanu-El’s sixth Music at Meyer series with “Fates of Flesh and Stone: Recent Songs of Jake Heggie.” There was enough material to fuel both camps of opinion. The subject matter included gays exterminated during the Holocaust, gay composer Francis Poulenc, and strong women, and some of the language was a bit edgy. All of the music was given the best showing imaginable by sopranos Emily Albrink and Kristin Clayton, mezzo-sopranos Frederica von Stade (Flicka) and Catherine Cook, tenor Nicholas Phan, baritone Brian Leerhuber, bass-baritone John Lindstrom, flutist Julie McKenzie, clarinetist Carey Bell, saxophonist David Henderson, violinist Dawn Harms, cellist Emil Miland, bassist Richard Worn, and the near-constant throughout the evening, pianist Heggie.
Heggie dedicated the evening to the gifted mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. “She is one of the people who needs our energy, love, and prayers right now,” Heggie told me by e-mail after the concert. “Her life has been a series of miracles, so I've no doubt she’ll pull off another one!” God bless them both.
With all due respect — and indeed, much respect is due the other fine singers on the program — two of the artists in the second half blew everyone else out of the water. As she approaches her retirement from opera with much fête and fanfare, the 63-year-old von Stade can still cause an entire audience to hold its breath with her uncommon ability to draw you to the heart of the matter. Not only does the voice remain rock-steady, but also its soul-touching intimacy is as profound as ever.
The songs themselves, to poetry by Charlene Baldridge (“Motherwit”), Eugenia Zukerman (“Grounded”), Armistead Maupin (“Mother in the Mirror’), and Heggie (“Let It Go”), explore the full range of Heggie’s art. To accompaniment arrestingly discordant at the start, Flicka and Clayton blended wonderfully. Flicka pared her voice down to magical, slim purity in parts of “Grounded,” a feat she repeated at the end of “Let It Go,” Heggie’s self-dialogue on the death of his father. Written when he was 19, it is quite moving in word alone; with von Stade at her most tender, it became a song to cherish.
“Let It Go” also provided a marvelous contrast to the hilarious tango of “Mother in the Mirror” (“you look in the mirror,” Heggie said by way of preface, “and you see your mother looking back at you”) and the irreverent poetry the thought inspired in Maupin.
Catherine Cook was given an immense challenge: how to do full justice to Statuesque, five settings of Gene Scheer’s poems about statues dedicated to the statuesque character singer Joyce Castle (and recorded by her on Flesh and Stone, a superb CD of Heggie’s music). Cook, a marvelous character actor in her own right, turned the cycle into an immense opportunity to display the full range of her craft. Two completely different voices for Picasso and his head; an idiomatically ideal, sultry jazz-blues send-off for Henry Moore’s reclining figure; and an outraged, brilliant, screaming cap to an often-hilarious portrayal of Winged Victory made the best case possible for a witty song cycle that is destined to win converts whenever it is performed with the personality it demands. This performance was fabulous.
Less fabulous was Heggie and Scheer’s For a Look or a Touch (2007, available from Naxos, sung by Morgan Smith). I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t touch me — baritone Leerhuber sang with the same beauty and power that he displayed in San Francisco Opera’s La Bohème last season, and cellist Miland played as eloquently as ever —but the music in the cycle of three songs based on stories from the documentary Paragraph 175 and the journal of gay Auschwitz victim, Manfred Lewin, did not go deep enough. Especially puzzling was the final wordless vocalise, which bore no resemblance to a Jewish melody. I’m gay, I’m Jewish, my ancestors were wiped out by the Nazis and the Russians before them — I wanted to be moved. I wasn’t.
Lindstrom, who is approaching octogenarian status, was touching in Heggie’s lovely setting of Robert Browning’s poem “Grow Old With Me!” (2004). Equally successful was Heggie and Scheer’s Rise and Fall (2007). The four songs, given a rapt performance by Albrink complete with radiant high notes, contained some of the most spiritually provocative poetry of an evening distinguished by its contrast of the spiritual and the profane. I’m not sure that Scheer’s “poetry” in the four songs of Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc qualifies as such, but tenor Phan, who gave the premiere of the cycle last year, has strength and solidity for days. Again, the issue was finding a way in beyond observer status.
Sections of certain songs — “Hatshepsut: The Divine Potter” in Statuesque, “The Story of Joe” in For a Look or a Touch, and “Raymonde Linossier” in the Poulenc homage — gave brief opportunities to appreciate Heggie’s gifts with instrumental ensemble. The writing was quite beautiful. I couldn’t get enough of McKenzie’s flute.