Jake Heggie is best known for Dead Man Walking, the most widely performed new opera of the last 25 years. With a libretto by Terrence McNally, it has been mounted by major theaters in more than 80 international productions. His critically acclaimed operas Moby-Dick, Three Decembers, and It’s a Wonderful Life, with libretti by Gene Scheer, have also established themselves in the classical canon. Heggie’s 10 full-length operas, numerous one-acts, and more than 300 art songs have been performed on five continents. Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “arguably the world’s most popular 21st-century opera and art song composer,” Heggie actively seeks out projects that invite a wide range of perspectives. Recent examples include Intelligence, based on the true story of women who infiltrated the Confederate White House, and Songs for Murdered Sisters, his collaboration with Margaret Atwood, created in response to the global epidemic of gender-based violence and nominated for Classical Album of the Year at the Juno Awards. Heggie has longstanding creative partnerships with mezzos Frederica von Stade, Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, and Jamie Barton, whose Heggie project Unexpected Shadows earned a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. Heggie continues to write all his work by hand, believing that a visceral, physical connection to the score is an essential part of composition.
Clifford (“Kip”) Cranna is Dramaturg (Scholar in Residence) Emeritus of San Francisco Opera, where he served on the staff for over forty years, more than thirty of them as Director of Music Administration. In 2008 he was awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor, and in 2012 he received the Bernard Osher Cultural Award for distinguished efforts to bring excellence to a cultural institution. In 2014 he received the Star of Excellence Award for outstanding service to the programs of the San Francisco Opera Guild. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University. For thirty years he was Program Editor and Lecturer for the Carmel Bach Festival. He lectures regularly on opera appreciation at the Fromm Institute at USF and the OLLI Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI) at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and Dominican University. He loves going on bike trips internationally and has a world-class collection of martini shakers.
