Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

Ricky Ian Gordon
b Oceanside (Long Island), New York, May 15, 1956
Referred to in The New York Times as “one of the leading younger composers of songs,”
Ricky Ian Gordon is a composer of unusual scope, equally at home writing for the
concert hall, opera, dance, theater and film. When his opera, The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
premiered in Houston, one critic said “… it revealed to Houstonians a composer with a
facile but compelling gift for song. His opera was, to me, another exciting moment in the
accelerating emergence of a collective American style of art music rooted equally in the
country’s vernacular and cultivated traditions.”
Other credits for Mr. Gordon include My Life With Albertine, with Richard Nelson at
Playwrights Horizons (cast recording, PS Classics), Dream True, with Tina Landau at The
Vineyard Theater (recorded on PS Classics), The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, with Jean Claude
Van Itallie at Houston Grand Opera and The American Music Theater Festival, Only
Heaven, with Langston Hughes for Encompass Opera (recorded on PS Classics),
Stonewall/Night Variations, with Tina Landau for En Garde Arts, States Of Independence, with Ms. Landau for The American
Music Theater Festival, and Autumn Valentine, with Dorothy Parker for Opera Omaha’s 1992 Fall Festival. As composerin-residence
at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2001 and 2002, he wrote Morning Star, with William Hoffman. On March
13, 2001, at Lincoln Center, he was presented as part of the American Songbook Series. The New York Times said, “If the music
of Ricky Ian Gordon had to be defined by a single quality, it would be the bursting effervescence infusing songs that
blithely blur the lines between art song and the high-end Broadway music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim
… It’s caviar for a world gorging on pizza.” Mr. Gordon’s songs have been performed and recorded by many internationally
known singers including Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Audra McDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson,
Deborah Voigt, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell and Betty Buckley. Other recordings include two Nonesuch
compact discs: Audra McDonald’s Way Back To Paradise and Bright Eyed Joy: The Songs Of Ricky Ian Gordon, and Water
Music/A Two-Part Requiem on Of Eternal Light, the Catalyst/BMG Classics CD with Musica Sacra conducted by Richard
Westenberg. Harolyn Blackwell, on the compact disc entitled Strange Hurt for RCA Victor, recorded Genius Child, a cycle
of ten Langston Hughes settings.
Current projects include this opera, The Grapes of Wrath with Michael Korie for The Minnesota Opera, which will be staged
at the co-commissioning Utah Opera in May, and For My Family, for which Gordon is also the book writer and lyricist,
has already had a developmental workshop at The Sundance Theater Lab. His orchestral song cycle and flowers pick
themselves…, which uses five poems by e. e. cummings, premiered on October 29 in Michigan.
Mr. Gordon’s collaboration with choreographer Seán Curran, Art Song Dance, premiered at The Joyce Theater in June
2005, and Orpheus and Euridice premiered as part of Lincoln Center’s New Visions Series American Songbook and Great Performers
Series on October 5, 2005, with Todd Palmer as the clarinetist, Elizabeth Futral, soprano, and Melvin Chin as the pianist.
Doug Varone directed and choreographed. Peter G. Davis in New York Magazine wrote: “Both Gordon’s text and music
are couched in an accessible idiom of disarming lyrical directness, a cleverly disguised faux naivete that always resolves
dissonant situations with grace and a sure sense of dramatic effect—the mark of a born theater composer.”
Orpheus and Euridice won a 2006 OBIE Award. The citation read:
A musician, a dead lover, an extraordinary journey; you might think this old tale has been told too many times, but one composer’s
personal passion, a choreographer’s startling imagination, and the courage of a producer, created one of this year’s most moving
theatrical events in any genre. For their new-visionary retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Euridice, the judges have awarded an Obie
to Ricky Ian Gordon, Doug Varone and The Lincoln Center New Visions program, Jon Nakagawa and Jane Moss producers.
gordon biography
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