Ricky Ian Gordon | |
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 Ricky Ian Gordon | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Ricky Ian Gordon |
| Born | May 15, 1956 Oceanside, New York, United States |
| Genres | Musical theatre, Opera |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, lyricist |
| Years active | 1956–present |
| Website | www |
Ricky Ian Gordon (born May 15, 1956) is an American composer of art song, opera and musical theatre.
Gordon was born in Oceanside, New York. He was raised by his mother, Eve, and father, Sam, and he grew up on Long Island with his three sisters, Susan, Lorraine and Sheila. Donald Katz based his book, Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America , on Gordon's family life. [1] Gordon attended Carnegie Mellon University.
The death of his lover from AIDS inspired Dream True (1998), Orpheus and Euridice (2005) and the song cycle Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet, Empty Chair and Piano (2007). He has composed several operas and had his music performed by Audra McDonald, Dawn Upshaw, Renée Fleming, Todd Palmer and others. [2] [3]
In 1992 Gordon set ten of Langston Hughes's poems to music for Harolyn Blackwell. [4] In February 2007, Gordon's opera, The Grapes of Wrath , premiered in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The opera was co-commissioned and co-produced by the Minnesota Opera and the Utah Symphony & Opera. In 2011 he wrote the music for Rappahannock County, a staged revue of twenty one songs about the Civil War, commissioned by the Virginia Arts Festival. [5]
In 2003, he wrote a musical based on selections from The Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. It was titled My Life With Albertine and featured Kelli O'Hara in her first starring role.
He was commissioned by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis for what became 27 (2014), an opera about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and their life at 27 Rue de Fleurus, as a work to star mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe. Royce Vavrek wrote the libretto. The piece made its New York premiere on Oct. 20, 2016.
In 2010, he released an album called A Horse With Wings in which he sang a collection of his art songs. In 2014 his opera A Coffin in Egypt had its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. [6]
He premiered his opera Morning Star at Cincinnati Opera in 2015. This opera follows a Russian Jewish family that immigrates to New York City in 1910. [7]
Gordon's opera The House Without a Christmas Tree had its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera on November 30, 2017. [8]
The world premiere of Gordon's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opens in January 2022. [9] It is a co-production between National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the New York City Opera.
Gordon's songwriting is steeped in the traditions of cabaret and musical theater, while his choice of themes has been idiosyncratic. [10] Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet, Empty Chair and Piano has been described as "a significant contribution to the culture sprung from the AIDS crisis", notable for its elegiac quality as well as its restraint. [11] His opera The Grapes of Wrath , based on the novel by John Steinbeck, has been cited for achieving "instant success that is rare for an American opera." [12]
Giorgio Bassani was an Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and international intellectual.
Houston Grand Opera (HGO) is an American opera company located in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1955 by German-born impresario Walter Herbert and three local Houstonians, the company is resident at the Wortham Theater Center. In its history, the company has received a Tony Award, two Grammy Awards, and three Emmy Awards, the only opera company in the world to win these three honours. Houston Grand Opera is supported by an active auxiliary organization, the Houston Grand Opera Guild, established in October 1955.
The New York City Opera (NYCO) is an American opera company located in Manhattan in New York City. The company has been active from 1943 through 2013, and again since 2016 when it was revived.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is an Italian historical novel by Giorgio Bassani, published in 1962. It chronicles the relationships between the narrator and the children of the Finzi-Contini family from the rise of Benito Mussolini until the start of World War II.
Jake Heggie is an American composer of opera, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. He is best known for his operas and art songs as well as for his collaborations with internationally renowned performers and writers.
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Michael Korie is an American librettist and lyricist whose writing for musical theater and opera includes the musicals Grey Gardens and Far From Heaven, and the operas Harvey Milk and The Grapes of Wrath. His works have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and internationally. His lyrics have been nominated for the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Korie was awarded the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Grapes of Wrath is an opera in three acts composed by Ricky Ian Gordon to a libretto by Michael Korie based on John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel of the same title. It premiered on February 10, 2007 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul, Minnesota in a production by Minnesota Opera. The work has been revised in subsequent years and has also been performed as a two-act concert version.
Edward Barnes is an American composer and producer.
Leonard Foglia is an American theatre director, librettist, and novelist.
Grant Gershon is a Grammy Award winning American conductor and pianist. He is Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Resident Conductor of the Los Angeles Opera, member of the Board of Councillors for the USC Thornton School of Music and a member of the Chorus America Board of Directors.
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, commonly known as NYTF, is a professional theater company in New York City which produces both Yiddish plays and plays translated into Yiddish, in a theater equipped with simultaneous superscript translation into English. The company's leadership consists of executive director Dominick Balletta and artistic director Zalmen Mlotek. The board is co-chaired by Sandra Cahn and Carol Levin.
Eric Simonson is an American writer and director in theatre, film and opera. He is a member of Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, and the author of plays Lombardi, Fake, Honest, Magic/Bird and Bronx Bombers. He won the 2005 Academy Award for his short documentary A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 1993 for The Song of Jacob Zulu.
Daniel Belcher is an American operatic baritone who has sung at many of the world's leading opera houses. He notably portrayed the role of John Brooke in the world premiere of Mark Adamo's Little Women and played the role of Andy Warhol in the premiere of Michael Daugherty's Jackie O, both with the Houston Grand Opera (HGO). He is particularly admired for his portrayal of Rossini heroes with Dandini in La Cenerentola and Figaro in The Barber of Seville being two of his signature roles.
Allen Moyer is an American set designer particularly known for his work in operas and Broadway musicals. He grew up in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania After two years at Albright College, he transferred to Pennsylvania State University where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University/Tisch School of the Arts where he studied with Oliver Smith and John Conklin. His designs have appeared in celebrated productions at the New York City Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and the Seattle Opera. He notably staged the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath at the Minnesota Opera in 2007. He designed his first set for the Metropolitan Opera for their new production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice which premiered on May 2, 2007.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Kelly Kaduce is an American soprano. She was born in Winnebago, Minnesota, United States of America. A graduate of St. Olaf College and Boston University, Kaduce won the 1999 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
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Eleanor Reissa is an American actress, singer, theatre director, playwright, librettist, choreographer, and translator based in New York City. She works and performs on English and Yiddish speaking stages. On Broadway, she was in the cast of Paula Vogel's Indecent, and she was nominated for a Tony Award as the director of the musical Those Were the Days. (which she also choreographed and starred in). She interprets and performs Yiddish theatre and song. In April 2019, Reissa was the director, co-creator and featured vocalist in From Shtetl to Stage: A Celebration of Yiddish Music and Culture at Carnegie Hall.
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