Amazon.com: The Grapes of Wrath/Live from the Minnesota Opera World Premiere: Ricky Ian Gordon, Grant Gershon, Deanne Meek and Brian Leerhuber: Music
I want to like this opera. I love Ricky Ian Gordon's music. His Bright Eyed Joy is one of my favorite CDs that I have listened to over and over again.
I have now experienced the opera 3 different ways: I was lucky enough to see a dress rehearsal. I also saw a full performance during the initial run at the Ordway. And now I have listened to the entire CD. Although I love much of the music in Grapes of Wrath I find that I enjoy the individual parts of the work. The whole does not move me the way I wish it did. My biggest issue is with Michael Korie's libretto. It is WAY too long. Also the mixing of the stylized dust bowl speech patterns with the operatic singing does not work for me. And diction is an issue--at times I can't understand what is being sung and at other times it is too perfect for the dialect of the text.
Any yet, there are moments. The opening chorus of "The last time there was rain" and the death of Noah as he sings "I can be a help" stand out for me.
With the material presented on this CD I hear the potential of a wonderful American Opera, but the story telling needs to be tighter. That being said I am still looking forward to what Mr. Gordon writes next.
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Alan Rich's Review
Steinbeck `Wrath' Sears in New Staging;
Review by Alan Rich
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Composer Ricky Ian Gordon's fluent, powerful setting of a great -- maybe the greatest -- American novel, John Steinbeck's ``The Grapes of Wrath,'' is now available on a vivid, three-CD box set from PS Classics. The opera already has drawn critical raves and silenced many of the naysayers who bemoan the lack of another great American opera of the stature of ``Porgy and Bess.''
First produced by the Minnesota Opera with a young, eager and mostly unknown cast led by Grant Gershon, ``The Grapes of Wrath'' is next due, in January 2009, at Opera Pacific in California's Orange County.
Best known so far for his adroit Broadway-style ``songbooks'' that challenge the best of Stephen Sondheim, and for a quasi-operatic treatment of the classic ``Orpheus and Euridice'' legend that the Long Beach Opera Company produced last season in a rowboat in a municipal swimming pool, Gordon admits to taking a huge leap into the unknown with this treatment of Steinbeck's epic novel.
``I finally had to decide that if I was going to be a composer, this is what I had to do,'' the 52-year-old, Long Island-born composer averred in a recent telephone chat.
Steinbeck's Ending
Librettist Michael Korie arrived at a similar conclusion. Author of lighter-weight texts, including one (``Hopper's Wife'' in which the wife of the painter metamorphoses into gossip columnist Hedda), Korie took on the Dust Bowl novel at full worth, bypassing the upbeat philosophy that ends the famous John Ford film version in favor of the stark tragedy of the Steinbeck original.
``The music just came flying out of me,'' Gordon remembers. Maybe so, but nothing in his pliant score suggests any sense of airy lightheartedness.
``The last time there was rain,'' the chorus sings wistfully at the start, eyeing their parched farmland and sadly remembering better times. At the end they sing with equal sadness of ``the day the rain began,'' destroying the cotton crop and sending the wandering Joad family again on the road.
``Simple Child,'' a song for Ma Joad on the death of her child Noah, has a haunting beauty that could guarantee it a separate concert life.
Opera, like Hollywood, loves American literature, though literature doesn't always return the compliment. Creditable musical treatments in recent years, imposed upon the literature of Tennessee Williams, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald and their fellows have come -- and, for the most part, gone.
Something about this ``Grapes of Wrath,'' however, suggests a staying power. Partly it is the humility, the willingness of composer and librettist to let Steinbeck's overpowering textual lyricism rest undisturbed. Partly it is the sound of Gordon's music: chorus and orchestra joined in this ``big fat musical,'' as he calls it, in a vernacular style that works even in an operatic and a serious concert setting.
Maybe, this time, that creaky old institution known as opera really has turned a corner. It wouldn't be a moment too soon.
@anonymous: Your quoting of the Alan Rich's review of the CD describes the reaction I wanted to have to this. I guess that brings up an interesting question as to why I was so hoping to have such an experience with this opera. Part of it is my stated enjoyment of Mr. Gordon's music. He has a way with the marriage of American English text and music that is truly unique. I have to admit that part of it is that I was lucky enough to meet him at American Composers Forum meet and greet before the dress rehearsal of the opera. Being a dress rehearsal it was difficult to get a dramatic arch of the opera, but the music was (and is) beautiful.
Mr. Rich talks about the "creaky old institution" called opera. I understand that statement, although I believe some of the best "opera" is actually coming out of our American Musical-Theatre tradition. I very much respond to those aspects of this work--in fact maybe I am hoping for more of that.
For me (and I can only speak for myself) this work is so close to something more than what I heard at the premiere run at the Ordway and what I hear on this CD. As stated, I believe an emphasis on the musical-theatre aspects would improve the story telling.
But perhaps I should have added this to the original post. If you love Gordon's music, ignore my comments and listen anyway.
It's a pleasure to report that Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath deserves a place in the extremely tiny pantheon of successful American operas based on classic American novels. (Porgy and Bess, the granddaddy of American opera, and in a class by itself, is based on a minor novel, Dubose Heyward's Porgy, which would undoubtedly be forgotten today if it were not for the opera.) Gordon is obviously a theatre composer -- he knows how to shape an ensemble, a scene, an act, to create a compelling large narrative musical arc. The score is endlessly inventive, and there is more than enough attention-grabbing material to justify its length of more than three hours. The ensemble, "The Last Time There Was Rain," gives the opera a particularly powerful opening; it provides a harrowing context for the devastation of the drought that sets the story in motion. Gordon is not afraid of melody, and he draws generously on popular idioms of the time, including jazz, Gospel and Broadway. His sound is firmly rooted in Gershwin and Copland, but it's also his own, with a contemporary sensibility holding enough musical surprises that it's identifiably a modern work. Gordon writes persuasively for the voice. His vocal lines are graceful and purposeful, and are supported by meaningful musical structures; there is none of the random lyrical meandering that afflicts so many contemporary operas. One reservation about the work's overall impact is the upbeat sound of so much of the score. The story is almost relentlessly grim, and while a Wozzeckian starkness would certainly be out of place here, the music sometimes tends to skirt the shock of the tragedies the heap up over the course of the story; some climactic moments seem merely cinematic rather than profoundly explored and expressed. Michael Korie brilliantly focuses the sprawling novel into a dramatically effective libretto that vividly individualizes the opera's many characters. Gordon is also especially gifted at musical characterization; one of the opera's greatest strengths is the diversity with which he limns the various members of the Joad family. The opera receives a splendid production from the Minnesota Opera, and this recording is taken from its first performances in February 2007. Grant Gershon leads the Minnesota Opera Chorus and Orchestra in stirring, committed performances. The large cast fills out the roles both vocally and dramatically. Especially memorable and powerful are Deanne Meek as Ma Joad, Brian Leerhuber as Tom Joad, Kelly Kaduce as Rosasharn, Roger Honeywell as Jim Casy, Robert Orth as Uncle John, Jesse Blumberg as Connie, and Andrew Wilkowske as Noah. The sound is clear and well balanced; almost every word, except for those in the most complex ensembles, is understandable, a testimony to the engineers' work as well as to Gordon's skill at text setting. The opera should be of strong interest to anyone concerned with developments in American lyric theatre. Stephen Eddins, All Music Guide
@anonymous: I'm not sure if this is the same person that left the first comment on this post, but if it is thank you for your comment. I would prefer that you leave you own comments and not quotes of entire articles from
http://www.rickyiangordon.com. This opera has received some wonderful press. However, if you would like to leave URLs to those articles, that would be great.
I'm sure many other people had different reactions than mine, but that is not going to change my initial reaction to the work as a whole. I am definitely looking forward to the CD of “and flowers pick themselves” and hope that you are too.
Thanks!
Chris
Chris, It's just that I was a fan of the work...including and especially the libretto, which I think is completely theatrical and not in the least blousy...if anything, I think it's a great work of lyric poetry for the musical theater. What I don't understand, is your seeing a "dress rehearsal" and judging the work form that...operas of this size, stupidly, but because of the financial exigencies of the opera world, unlike Broadway shows, have NO PREVIEWS...no time to perfect the work...so a dress rehearsal, which I saw as well, is no reflection on the finished product...it is all the artists coming together at the same time to try and see what the hell it is they have on the stage...it is like judging a show at first previews...in any case, if you are such a fan of Mr. Gordon's, the next time you might give something that takes years to write, more than a dress rehearsal to judge it's dramatic viability.
@anonymous: Thank you for commenting back--now I realize that there has been a misunderstanding here. I did see a full performance after the dress rehearsal when it was here at the Ordway. My comments are actually based mainly on that performance (which was later in the run--I think it was actually the last performance) and listening to the CD again. I do realize how much effort is involved in putting on a show of any kind. And actually I do think of the initial run like a Broadway preview. In that vein I stand by my opinion: I do find the libretto too long. In saying that I think it would be difficult to cut because so many of the moments work so well. But IMHO the opera would be served by focusing it more. I remember thinking "whose story is this? Tom's or Rosasharn's?" I am not making these comments based just on a dress rehearsal, which I would agree would be unfair. (Actually, from that dress rehearsal I was very happy with the work. But again, I felt like I didn't get a sense of the full structure of the opera from it--nor did I expect to get that from a dress rehearsal.)
I am curious as to whether or not in subsequent performances (after St. Paul) if cuts were made. From the dress rehearsal I believe cuts had already been made. I was hoping that the CD I might get a sense of that, but I did not.
I hope this clarifies that I am judging the full performance (both live and from listening again on the CD). Thank you for the comments. I enjoyed Mr. Korie's lyrics for Grey Gardens and I enjoyed the structure of those songs and of individual numbers in GOW. It is the macro-architecture that I question.
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