Jamie Barton & Jake Heggie

From Purcell’s wonderous ‘Music for a While’ to Heggie’s own arias, via 19th-century Lieder and Florence Price’s beautiful vocal lines, tonight is about appreciating music’s capacity for emotional expression. The centrepiece is deeply personal to both performers – song cycle What I Miss the Most was their lockdown project, with moving texts by friends including Joyce DiDonato, Patti LuPone and the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg articulating their feelings in early lockdown.

Self-described ‘die-hard feminist’ Barton champions the voices of women. Tonight she focuses on the unjustly neglected music of Price and arias from some of Heggie’s powerful female opera characters. ‘Jamie Barton is a star… already a proper, bona fide star’ said The Guardian in 2019. She is – you only need hear her voice to feel thankful that live music has returned.