Recital Tour with Jake Heggie (Autumn 2021)

Barbican Centre

“Barton and Heggie are made for each other – and they set the Barbican alight. You could almost feel the temperature in the Barbican Hall rise as wattage radiated from star American mezzo Jamie Barton and composer-pianist Jake Heggie. Vocally very much the real deal, with a velvet-and-steel instrument and the technique to deploy it, she’s also an outspoken campaigner and advocate for all things marginalised, queer and body-positive, smashing the classical patriarchy one operatic ending at a time. Here it was all about song, taking advantage of a Sunday-night slot to drag the classical recital out of the church and into the cabaret – chatting, joking, back-and-forthing with an audience whooping before she’d even sung a note. But then she did. And everything stopped.

The unaccompanied start of Heggie’s “Music” (setting a text by Dead Man Walking’s Sister Helen Prejean about giving a man on death row a Walkman) is absolutely exposed – music cut through to the bone. Barton took us right down with her. A segue into Purcell’s Music for A While was an elegant reminder that nothing changes across the centuries, Barton and Heggie drawing out the astringent, after-hours wit of Britten’s piano realisation… Straddling art-song, Broadway and jazz, Heggie’s is a musical language that speaks directly. It’s literally made for Barton, who wears it with as much easy glamour as the fur coat she describes in his Iconic Legacies cycle. But it was elsewhere – in Price’s heady romance and the fretful rhythms of Schubert’s Gretchen – that we got the full measure of a singer who refuses to squash herself into small, pretty musical spaces, but instead spills joyously out over the lines, carrying us all along with her.”
–Alexandra Coghlan, i news

“There’s standard-issue onstage chemistry – and then there’s the extravaganza of hip shimmies and floor kissing that erupts periodically between mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and composer-pianist Jake Heggie. It was Barton’s straightforward delight in performing that set the tone. And it was much more than delight: Barton’s extraordinary talent as a musical communicator was clear from the deeply soulful unaccompanied opening of the first item (a song from Heggie’s cycle The Breaking Waves), her low notes thrillingly rich, her delivery so compelling as to instantly create the kind of silence in which no one dares to breathe. Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s Music for a While abounded with colour, fearlessly embracing rather than smoothing over the differences between registers. Schubert’s An die Musik became almost seductive and Brahms’s Unbewegte Laue Luft was unequivocally so. In four beautiful songs by the African American composer Florence Price she trod a fine line between brash Broadway lyricism and ultra-intimate lieder singing. Barton could make bewitching musical sense of more or less any score, I’d hazard…”
–Flora Willson, The Guardian

“An unconventional programme designed to delight… The American pair brought verve and spark to their programme, to an enthusiastic response. Barton has become a formidable champion of works by women and marginalised communities [as well as] an operatic singer unafraid to unleash her powerful and magnificent instrument…by any reckoning superb.”
–Barry Millington, Evening Standard

“Barton certainly knows how to play to a crowd to generate an extra layer of excitement in her recitals, which not only makes the audience feel valued but also an active part of the experience. The atmosphere felt highly intimate from the outset. Barton revealed a sound that is so rich and secure that it can then be taken to an infinite number of places in order to fulfill what the music requires. During the first half, Barton treated us to impeccable performances of Schubert and Brahms. It was, however, in four songs by Florence Price that she was best able to project her own personality. These works deserve to be far better known, and so it was good to hear Barton championing them. The songs as a whole enabled Barton to contrast moments of quiet contemplation or even agitation alongside others, such as the ending to the final song, of absolute power. Heggie wrote his cycle especially for Barton and she proved to be in her element, tackling music that he had clearly designed to demonstrate her penchant for conveying a vast range of textures, emotions and dynamics. Barton offered an immaculate performance of Harold Arlen’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ by way of an encore.”
–Sam Smith, MusicOMH

“Heggie was accompanist to big-voiced, generous-hearted mezzo Jamie Barton. Their programme offered rare, seductive songs by African-American composer Florence Price, richly-coloured Brahms and three of Heggie’s own vocal works. Barton kept the audience hanging on every word. The spark this pair lights never went out.”
–Richard Fairman, Financial Times

“A luxuriously ebullient mezzo... A tantalising string of magic moments. During the first half, Barton effortlessly cast a spell as she conveyed the mood of blissful calm that opens Brahms’s Unbewegte Laue Luft. She spread another kind of rapture riding the lyrical waves in music by the formerly forgotten Florence Price. The second half devoted to Heggie’s creations, partly following the pair’s album Unexpected Shadows (nominated for a forthcoming Grammy award), showed singer and composer happily swinging between art song and cabaret. What I Miss the Most, a new song cycle setting inviting comments from celebrity friends about their pandemic experience, struck gold with the simple beauties conjured from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s heartfelt rejoicing in music itself, or Barton’s warm, contented vocalise at the end of Patti LuPone’s hymn to domesticity.”
–Geoff Brown, The Times

“The best classical music of 2021: A return to live performance gave us giddy celebration…mezzo Jamie Barton lit up the Barbican stage.”
–Alexandra Coghlan, i news

Oper Frankfurt

“The voice of American mezzo Jamie Barton is one of such stability and security that it’s almost old-fashioned – it represents a delightful contrast to her diverse musical interests.  She began the recital a capella with the short piece “Music,” written by her collaborative pianist Jake Heggie, followed by Henry Purcell‘s “Music for a While” and finished the set with Franz Schubert‘s “An die Musik.” She traversed through the centuries, making all three pieces irresistible Jamie Barton songs, celebrating the music as much as the periods they are from. Barton has lots of staying power and patience, and she can gradually make her voice disappear in an impressive diminuendo. What she does, it has to be said, is always Grand Opera. That Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” can sound like Richard Wagner – a strange experience but you want to be there for it… A lively sequence of memories of a tragic and teasing nature, which Barton treats playfully and lovingly. The art of song lives on.”
–Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

“Heavenly – it couldn’t have been better. What a recital! Jamie Barton's wonderful voice, great stage presence, and a program to discover and enjoy too. Jamie Barton had a lot of text to perform, and she embodied this music in glowing depth and dramatic height with a feeling for wit and dark abysses and their constant change.”
–Andreas Bomba, Frankfurter Neue Presse