Jake Heggie's brief, but explosively successful composing career has
been all vocal. The author of songs and the opera "Dead Man Walking," a
well-regarded accompanist to singers, Heggie made his debut only tonight
with an instrumental work.

The Oakland East Bay Symphony, conducted by Michael Morgan, gave the
world premiere of Heggie's cello concerto in the Paramount Theater, with
San Francisco Opera cellist Emil Miland as soloist.

It's a beautiful, melodic, accessible work, contributing 26 very pleasant
minutes to the body of contemporary neoclassical music. Technically
instrumental, in fact, it is a vocalise, the cello singing in a near-human
voice.

It may be described as a "cello concerto," but Heggie knows his own work
well enough to avoid the designation. With none of the contest or struggle
between soloist and orchestra that characterizes most concertos, this
is really a cello sonata with symphonic accompaniment. Heggie's name for
it is "Essay for Cello and Orchestra," and he titled it "Holy the Firm,"
after an Annie Dillard story.

The meaning of the story, in Heggie's words, is in dealing with tragedy
(a plane crash in the story, living in the post-9/11 for Heggie), and
the dilemma "how to accept the presence of a loving God in a world so
absolutely fraught with terrible violence."

That sounds heavy, but the music is not. It provides a romantic, shimmering
atmosphere for the cello, which speaks in a contemplative mode. There
are a few instances of dramatic orchestral tutti and the cello occasionally
sounds sad ("profound!" the young cellist corrects the adjective in "A
Little Night Music"), but the setting is one of prayer and acceptance,
not strife and tragedy.

"The cello," Heggie has written, "is such a human and vocal instrument:
powerful and throaty, it can whisper or scream, seduce, soothe, or rebel.
Pitted against a full orchestra, it seems incredibly vulnerable. It could
easily be swallowed up and lost." Such is not the case here. Morgan and
the OEBS provided a loving embrace for Milland's powerful instrument,
but the writing is so song-like, operatic, that even a lesser performance
wouldn't swallow up the cello. Milland, visible nervous at the beginning
of the work, was not at his best, slurring some attacks, but he gained
control quickly and he then provided the kind of secure, gorgeous tone
he consistently delivers, whether at the Opera or front and center, with
the New Century Chamber Orchestra.

 From the wondrous opening bars in the orchestra (early Schoenberg meets
Faure, in a Rimsky-Korsakov fairytale setting), the solo instrument waits
less than 10 seconds to claim its place and it never relinquishes it.
While the cello plays a long, subtle line, stretching over whole pages,
there are bursts of Janacek-like fragments of dazzling color in the
orchestra - material Puccini would have developed and stretched a
hundredfold.

"Holy the Firm" is a splendid addition to the cello literature as well
as to the genre of song without words.

Janos Gereben/SF
[log in to unmask]