Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

Published and represented by Williamson Music, the publishing company of The Rodgers and Hammerstein
Organization, Gordon’s publications include four songbooks: A Horse With Wings, Genius Child, Only Heaven and Finding
Home. Three publications herald a new relationship with publisher Carl Fischer Music as well: The Piano Music of Ricky
Ian Gordon, Songs For Our Time and Orpheus and Euridice.
Awards include the National Institute for Music Theater Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, The Gilman and
Gonzalez-Falla Music Theater Foundation Award, the Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, the Constance Klinsky Award
and a National Institute for Music Theater Award. Dream True won a Richard Rodgers Production Award, and My Life
With Albertine won the 2002 at&t Award. The vocal score is published by Williamson Music.
On April 28–29, 2002, there were two sold-out concerts of Mr. Gordon’s music at the Guggenheim Museum as part of
the Works and Process series, with Audra McDonald, Theresa McCarthy, Lewis Cleale and Darius DeHaas with Ted Sperling
conducting. Stephen Holden wrote:
As the singers performed more than 20 of Mr. Gordon's songs, the majority arranged by the composer for a 10-member ensemble
conducted by Ted Sperling, the music bubbled and cascaded like a mountain brook after a spring rain. Over and over, one had the image
of a boy skipping ecstatically through fields and woods on a crisp April morning.
Mr. Gordon's love of poetry is evident from the clarity and ease of flow of settings that rarely allow a word to get lost. Whether giving
musical voice to Hughes's urban angst or to Parker's cynicism, the composer instinctively looks for the silver lining. He turns despair into
sadness and softens bitter into wry. Several of his settings of Hughes's poems are inflected with Jazz Age flavors that suggest the blues,
but as played by a jazz band at a champagne reception on an ocean liner.
— The New York Times, April 30, 2002
Michael Korie
b Elizabeth, New Jersey, April 1, 1955
Writing for both opera and musical theater, Michael Korie wrote the lyrics
to the new musical Grey Gardens now playing on Broadway at The Walter
Kerr Theatre following its premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Based
on the Maysles documentary about the society recluses Edith Bouvier Beale and
her daughter “Little Edie,” with a book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel,
direction by Michael Greif and a heralded performance by Christine Ebersole, it
was awarded The Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Musical of 2006
and was chosen as the Time Magazine number one show of the year. New York
Magazine cited Korie’s lyrics as “the sharpest in town,” while Rolling Stone found
it “an original score with the power to live in your head long after you leave the
theater.” Also with composer Frankel, Korie wrote both book and lyrics to Doll,
presented at The Ravinia Festival in a production The Chicago Tribune called “an
elegant show, fascinating and challenging,” and the upcoming Meet Mister Future,
set to premiere in Los Angeles in 2008. Following developmental productions at
La Jolla Playhouse, his lyrics to composer Lucy Simon’s music for the new musical Zhivago will premiere abroad next season
in a full production directed by Des McAnuff on London’s West End with book by Michael Weller based on Pasternak’s
novel.
Korie has previously enjoyed writing lyrics to composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s songs performed live in concert and broadcast
from Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall conducted by Grant Gershon. The Grapes
of Wrath is their first full-length collaboration. His libretti for operas with composer Stewart Wallace include Hopper’s Wife,
gordon biography
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