Camille Claudel • Press Coverage
Critical Acclaim
“The haunting cover photo of the dishevelled sculptor Camille Claudel sets the conceptual tone for song-cycles by Jake Heggie that, for all their relative harmonic conservatism, expand what the medium can do to explore uncharted emotional territory. Invariably, one is ambushed by the music’s cumulative effect.”
Gramophone
“Camille Claudel is in a league of its own. It’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs in its heart-stopping narration of a personal tragedy. Heggie is at his melodic best.”
Reaction UK
“As he has done for singers throughout his career, Heggie has made the cycle a glowing showcase for the vocalist. The writing for quartet — filled with insinuating themes and deft harmonies — sets the stage, but never intrudes. And the vocal parts are brilliant: spare and pristine in several settings, luxuriantly ornamented in others. This is a work that sings, ardently, melodically, and dramatically.”
San Francisco Classical Voice
“A well-crafted score.”
BBC Music Magazine
“Written for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, Camille Claudel – Into the Fire recalls the day on which the French sculptor and muse of the better-known Auguste Rodin was confined to the Ville-Évrard asylum. Mr. Heggie provides melodic lines that dig into the nuances of the language with sounds that are both unmistakably modern and mildly suggestive of the tonal world of Debussy, with whom Claudel was erroneously rumored to have shared a liaison. Mr. Heggie pays homage to Ms. DiDonato’s consummate mastery of Baroque and bel canto repertories by giving her coloratura passages and… music that calls upon every shimmering color in her voice.”
Voix des Arts
“Heggie’s cycle, setting an evocative text by Gene Scheer, traces [Claudel’s] downward path in seven cleverly crafted movements for soprano and strings.”
The Times UK
“DiDonato and the Brentano String Quartet delivered a radiant performance of Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, at The Chicago Art Museum. Heggie’s rendition of Claudel’s story is beautiful for its intimacy of scale, a single voice and four strings describing in seven songs Claudel speaking to her sculptures on the day she knows she will enter the asylum. In “Prelude: Awakening,” the strings organize themselves into an eerie waltz that wilders—sometimes warm, sometimes rushing, sometimes fragmented—a dance that flourishes and limps, becoming plaintive as the voice enters in a dreamy recollection, a quotation of one of Claudel’s letters. Perhaps loveliest is La petite châtelaine, named for the portrait of a little girl Claudel first modeled in 1892, sometimes thought to represent Claudel’s aborted child by Rodin, here a lullaby for what will never wake, a question that can never be answered.”
Chicago Reader