Twenty-five years after its premiere, composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally’s empathic opera about a Death Row inmate and the Catholic nun who becomes his spiritual adviser felt more dramatically intense than ever in its return to SF Opera and was filled with wrenching performances.
Read More"I walked into this assuming that if somebody's on death row, they probably deserve to be there. I unlearned a lot of things that I think the criminal justice system is very happy to let people assume. I'm grateful to this piece for challenging me to ask, ‘Okay, where do I really sit? How do I feel about this thing that both affects and ends lives?’"
Read MoreMezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and Heggie have worked in recital and on song cycles, so it’s little surprise that she delivers an incandescent performance.
Read More“It shows you the story from all the different aspects,” Barton said. At no point does it tell you, ‘You have to be on his side,’ or ‘You shouldn’t be on his side. I’m so glad it’s Jake Heggie who wrote this because he really knows how to flesh out a human story, and Sister Helen Prejean is as human as it gets in so many ways.”
Read MoreWhen Barton first heard “Look Me in the Eye,” one of the big arias in Jake Heggie’s opera Intelligence, the power of the music left her in tears. She would participate in the 2023 world-premiere performance of Intelligence. Now, a live recording of that world premiere by Houston Grand Opera is being released by HGO and LSO Live.
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