Jake Heggie, American Composer and Pianist
Mina Miller, Founder and Artistic Director, Music of Remembrance
Kip Cranna, Dramaturg, SF Opera - Moderator

This program is part of the 2015 Platforum series Music Matters, sponsored by Ernst & Young and the John and Marcia Goldman Foundation.

Since 1998, Music of Remembrance has remembered the Holocaust and honored its legacy by preserving and performing music by composers of that period, and by commissioning today’s leading composers to create new works that tell important stories. These commissions have included major works by Jake Heggie, arguably the most important American opera composer of our day. A recent Wall Street Journal article said of Heggie: “He reduces major universal issues to credible personal stories, to which a listener can connect.” Heggie also is an unusually courageous composer, unafraid of addressing complex social and human questions.

In this evening’s conversation moderated by Kip Cranna, Heggie and Music of Remembrance’s Mina Miller will share musical examples and a preview of Heggie’s compelling new opera “Out of Darkness,” slated for its world premiere in Seattle and San Francisco next May. This eloquent portrait of survival conveys the Holocaust’s vast scope by weaving together true stories of those caught in its grasp: a prisoner in Auschwitz who dared to create poems of defiance under the noses of her captors, and two idealistic young gay men whose lives and love were torn apart by Nazi persecution.