Jake Heggie has long been recognized as a dominant figure in contemporary opera and art song. But with the premiere of a newly orchestrated version of his 2013 song cycle From the Book of Nightmares, he proved that his talent for vocal line has an equal match in his understanding of instrumental color.
Heggie — who joined the composition faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2025 — created this orchestration for the SFCM New Music Ensemble, which gave the work its first performance last Friday, Feb. 27, in Barbro Osher Recital Hall under the baton of Nicole Paiement.
The skeleton orchestra followed the “one-of-each-instrument” layout typical of contemporary ensemble music, but even these forces were quite large for the relatively small hall. While the clarity of the acoustics in the space is top-notch, its size leads it to be particularly dry when a full audience is squeezed in.
Though many of the pieces on the program would have benefitted from the natural reverberation of a larger venue, Heggie’s piece was a perfect fit for the smaller space. The opening bars of the first song seemed to orchestrate their own resonance, rather than rely on the hall. Paiement’s expert balancing of the ensemble further enhanced Heggie’s refined ear for ensemble writing. Indeed, it was throughout his songs that the group sounded its most cohesive of the evening
But beyond technique is taste: the rich, saccharine orchestration of Heggie’s closing lullaby was artfully understated enough to keep its haunting beauty from sounding trite. It was in simple moments such as these that his expertise came into clearest relief.
While the transparency of this new orchestration might benefit from a lighter voice, soprano Katie Ivie gave a spirited performance of the four songs, rendering with equal facility a pointed comedic directness and controlled flexibility required of Heggie’s flowing melismas. Her warm but afflicted tone, and graceful phrasing, made the third song a particular highlight.
As in the original piano version, these orchestrated songs make use of an obbligato cello part to great effect. The part was played elegantly by SFCM alum Evan Kahn, also performed the world premiere of a new cello concerto composed by Inbal Segev. There, Kahn’s artistry was on full display. His deep, resonant sound was imbued with a subtle yet welcome coarseness, and his intonation was sublime, only occasionally faltering in quick passagework across multiple strings. But the concerto was carried forward most of all by Kahn’s energetic and purposeful phrasing.
Segev’s Postcards to Jerusalem draws upon her memories of music she heard growing up in Israel — defined by slight glissandi, the Ahava Raba scale, and pizzicati designed to imitate the oud (a lute-like instrument common in the Middle East.) The concerto was at its strongest when it was lyrical. The effective juxtaposition of entwining melodic lines against dry pizzicati violins created a poignant melancholy in the second movement.
The textural arpeggiating of the quicker first movement was not as convincing. Still, while a bit overbearing in such a small hall, the complex percussion part that supported these textures was particularly well handled (by composer and performers alike), and able to hold the momentum of the asymmetric meter.
The two pieces on the first half of the program — Encleadus by Matt Holloway and A Day in the Forest Dreams by Billy Childs — were composed for an unusual subset of the full ensemble: a combination of woodwind quintet and piano. This instrumentation has a few precedents (notably Mozart’s Quintet K. 452, which omits the flute) but it is challenged from the start with all the difficulties of blend faced by both a wind quintet and a piano quintet. Aside from a few sumptuous moments toward the climax of Childs’s first movement, this heterogeneity was near constant.
Leaning into this fate can lead to charming results. The second movement of the same work utilized conversational, back-and-forth writing between the woodwind quintet and the piano solo which was quite compelling. The young ensemble’s crisp articulation was well-suited to the dry harmony in fourths that peppered this movement.