Harris-Heggie: The Reemergence of a Pianist

An inveterate story teller, Johana Harris-Heggie nevertheless seems to avoid reminiscing--she lives and laughs in the present.

But Roy Harris’ widow, now remarried, can sometimes be persuaded to look back. The other afternoon, for instance, at the end of a long day of teaching at UCLA, the veteran pianist, who will be 76 in January, seemed in the mood for short forays into the past.

The reasons for such forays weretwofold: first, the release this week of the first two CD recordings, on MCA Classics, of a 10-album set on which Harris-Heggie surveys her wide pianistic repertory, from before Bach to beyond Harris. This recording project, completed in two months in 1987, contains more than 175 works.

Second, the start of a new concert season for Harris-Heggie and her second husband, John (Jake) Heggie, who have, in the six years since their marriage, become a two-piano team. The Heggies, with violinist Arturo Delmoni, violist Donald McInnes and cellist Timothy Landauer, open the 1988-89 season of the California Chamber Virtuosi at Pepperdine University, Malibu, tonight.

Leading a visitor into the subterranean lounge at the UCLA Faculty Center, Harris-Heggie tells a couple of stories about current UCLA life, then guides her guest through some New York memories from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

Not mentioning her principal mentor at the Juilliard School in those days, Ernest Hutcheson (she calls later to rectify that omission), the light-haired musician--in those days her name was still Beula Duffey--suddenly remembers another of her teachers there:

“Do you know I studied composition with Rubin Goldmark? He was an intimidating character who wore a walrus mustache and a scowl, but took a close interest in the welfare of all his students.

“I must have been writing far-out stuff, because he used to say, ‘Beula! come up here and play this. You’re on a greased chute to hell!’ ”

Later memories come to mind, memories of Roy Harris (whom she married in 1936), of their New York friends from the worlds of folk song and popular music: Tommy Dorsey, Alan Lomax, Leadbelly. . . .

--The years of World War II, spent in Colorado, when the Harrises collaborated on folk-song collecting and recording and began to raise their family.

--Years of academic touring, from Tennessee to Pennsylvania to Illinois to Indiana and finally to UCLA and Cal State Los Angeles. For the last two decades of Roy Harris’ life, the couple, with their five children, lived in Pacific Palisades.

But Harris-Heggie was, then and always, a pianist--not just a good one, but a standard-setting one. And a teacher--her first teaching appointment was at the age of 18, when she joined the Juilliard faculty. In the world of piano, many consider her to be foremost among adjudicators, competition judges and friends to young pianists.

It was in her pedagogical mode that she met composer/pianist Jake Heggie, who arrived at UCLA from Paris (where he had studied for two years with Pierre Sancan) in the fall of 1981. Despite the 48-year gap in their ages, and with the blessings of her children, the couple were married in December, 1982.

“We didn’t know we were a two-piano team until after we were married,” Heggie recalled.

“But we found out, fast. It’s not only that we have the same approach to sound and color--we just naturally seem to think and feel together. We never have to talk about things, or make adjustments. And, of course, we have a tremendous amount of fun.”

At Pepperdine, the Heggies will open the 8 p.m. program with Mozart’s Sonata in D, K. 448, which Jake Heggie describes as “the very first work written for two pianos, not just for two keyboard instruments, but actually for pianos. It’s an unusual work for us to be playing, since we mostly play music of the 20th Century.”

Then, after the string players offer a trio by Schubert, Harris-Heggie will join them for Brahms’ Piano Quartet, Opus 60.