Jake Heggie appears to have assumed Ned Rorem's mantle as the finest American art song composer of his generation. He is a natural and winning melodist whose sweetly diatonic vocal lines rest atop simple but never simplistic accompaniments - here, piano and strings. What's more, he writes expertly for the voice (women's voices in particular), while his choice of poetry - the range here extends from A.E. Housman and Rainer Maria Rilke to Vachel Lindsay and Edna St. Vincent Millay - shows a discerning sensibility. Yes, sentiment flows freely in these songs, but Heggie rarely descends to sentimentality.

"My heart and musical soul lie in storytelling through song," Heggie writes in his introduction to this rewarding collection; and so it is with songs and song cycles (composed over the near two-decade stretch from 1999-2007) that reflect, with both honey and rue, on lovers, friends and family. Framing the recital are songs to texts by playwright Terrence McNally - A Lucky Child, a lovely bit of childhood nostalgia, sung with exquisite tenderness by Susan Graham; and 'Final Monologue' from Master Class, McNally's play based on Maria Callas's fabled vocal seminars at the Juilliard School, beautifully done by Joyce DiDonato, although I'm not at all convinced the music and text really belong together.

But the central attractions here are the four song cycles. Some Times of Day, settings of Raymond Carver poems composed in 2004 ("what I imagine as the journey through a day: a metaphor for life's journey," Heggie writes) is by turns slyly jazzy, wistful and filled with a warm sense of domestic contentment. It is finely sung by Zheng Cao, with piano trio. Frederica von Stade, Graham and DiDonato sound as if they're having a ball in Facing Forward/Looking Back (2007), a cycle of duets about the slippery relationships of mothers and daughters, with texts by Eugenia Zukerman, Armistead Maupin and others.

The earliest piece, Heggie's 1999 Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia (poems by Millay and the composer), is a portrait of the Shakespearean heroine in music that's somewhat beholden to Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, and is pleasingly sung by Isabel Bayrakdarian.

I was especially taken with Here and Gone, a 2005 cycle for tenor, baritone and piano quartet to words by Housman and Lindsay. The poems are organized around a subtext narrative - a man returns to his childhood town in hopes of reconnecting with a male friend whose affections he had once spurned, only to learn that the friend is dead. Keith Phares and Paul Groves bring to the songs and duets an affecting sense of loss and regret as to the road not taken. The strings and piano lend textural as well as emotional weight to Heggie's touching little memory play.

With singers as splendid as Avie's roster (several of whom are Heggie 'regulars') and with the composer's authoritative accompaniments at the piano, admirers of contemporary American song have much to savor.