"THE GRAPES OF WRATH:" Ricky Ian Gordon's Opera
If you’re going to reconnect with a composer you admire but have lately lost, you might as well reconnect at Carnegie Hall. That’s what I did with Ricky Ian Gordon recently, or rather that’s where Ricky Ian Gordon gave me the chance to catch up with him, at a lavish concert staging by MasterVoices of The Grapes of Wrath, his gorgeous opera, written with librettist Michael Korie.
Ricky and I go back a ways. Mary Rodgers and her son, Adam Guettel, first introduced me to his work, and to him in the mid-1990s, after they jointly gave his then-nascent composing career a push with recitals at their respective residences. I soon was writing about Mr. Gordon in the New York Times; his scintillating four-song contribution to Audra McDonald’s landmark first solo album, Way Back to Paradise in 1997; his musical memory play about AIDS loss, Dream True: My Life with Vernon Dexter, at the Vineyard Theater in 1999.
Eventually, I found myself wandering over to his Westside apartment for an afternoon, to listen in on what Ricky was working on. He played and sang at the piano, I absorbed it all, rapt. In 2001, he came out with Bright Eyed Joy, a ravishing CD of songs set to the poetry of Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker and others (including Ricky Ian Gordon), released on Nonesuch Records.
“Joy, you might say, is not what it once was,” I wrote then (and stand by still ).
“Lately, joy just seems to have fallen under suspicion, too easily confused perhaps with the cheaper commercial sentimentalities. The possibility that life might yield a bit of pure joy simply hasn’t held up very well. On the subject of joy we’ve become a pretty skeptical bunch.
“Ricky Ian Gordon’s music has the power to repudiate such skepticism.”
Raised on the South Shore of Long Island, Ricky had entered Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist but emerged a composer. “I started writing music all the time,” he told me. “I mean, a song a day. Ferverous, scary discipline. By the time I came to New York, I had this… well, body of work.”
His first opera, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, written on commission for the Houston Grand Opera, premiered in 1996. The Grapes of Wrath followed a decade later, debuting at The Minnesota Opera in 2007. I heard some of it for the first time in Ricky’s apartment and was riveted. It didn’t hurt that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books, but that isn’t any guarantee of satisfaction in an adapted work. Ricky, in his opera, captured essences of The Grapes of Wrath that spoke to me most deeply: The bonds and the constrictions of profound familial love. The biblical scope of Steinbeck’s tragic, All-American story. The outrage of inequity. It was all there in his music.
I did not make it to Minneapolis for The Grapes of Wrath and would not see it performed live until this month at Carnegie Hall. The opera’s success, though, launched Ricky Ian Gordon as a prolific opera composer. 27, an original work about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2014. A Coffin in Egypt, based on the Horton Foote play, also premiered in 2014, at Houston Grand Opera. Morning Star, derived from a play by Sylvia Regan about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, debuted at Cincinnati Opera in 2015.
I missed them all in their various regional appearances, but I did catch flashes of music from them all via Ricky at his living room piano when I returned to interview him for my book, EVER AFTER. Ricky also composed significant song cycles during this time, and a children’s opera, as well as the 2003 musical, My Life with Albertine — conjured from sections of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
After that, I’m afraid, he and I drifted away from home visits. I followed his career avidly but, ultimately, because of the pandemic, missed his next, and perhaps best opera, Intimate Apparel. A joint commission from the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater, adapted from Lynn Nottage’s celebrated play about a turn-of-the-20th Century Black seamstress in New York City, Intimate Apparel the opera finally emerged from Covid lockdown for a run at the Newhouse Theater in January 2022; a time when I was still not yet attending in-person events at all. I wrestled mightilywith how much I wanted to see and hear Intimate Apparel at the time. In the end, though, fear of infection won out.
The one-night only performance of The Grapes of Wrath at Carnegie Hall conducted by MasterVoices maestro Ted Sperling, leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the 120-member MasterVoices chorus, was shot through with a frisson of rediscovery for me. The vast expanse of the venerable Carnegie Hall stage was packed to its outer limits with musicians, instruments and costumed choristers. The rear walls flashed with elaborate projections of deeply evocative Dustbowl-era photographs. This was quite a production.
The hall itself teemed with a crowd of eager auditors, like me. The opening chords descended upon us like a fanfare. The familiar (to me) story then unfolded in a series of set pieces vividly rendered by a passel of operatic luminaries, including Nathan Gunn — steadfast and boomingly stoic as Pa Joad; Margaret Lattimore — flinty and regally maternal as Ma Joad; and, especially, Mikaela Bennett, who captured Rose of Sharon, the tragic, spiritual heart of The Grapes of Wrath, with eloquent ethereal vocalese. There were not one but two starry narrators flanking the singers: Joe Morton, best known for his movies with auteur John Sayles, and J. Smith-Cameron, infamous now for her stint on Succession. (She and I first met on an upper-Westside unemployment line a million years ago, when we both were fresh kids, but that is another story).
I once tried to pin down in words Ricky Ian Gordon’s musical voice. It came out this way: “A shimmering admixture — Bernstein to Blitzstein to Sondheim, through Hindemith, via Barber, by way of Britten.” In The Grapes of Wrath this voice still resounds. There is surprisingly little literal Dustbowl music in Ricky’s score. I spotted one banjo set down among a bunch of string instruments in the orchestra; it was picked up and played mostly for texture. Virtually nothing in The Grapes of Wrath twangs with a Country or Western pastiche. Instead of bending Ricky Ian Gordon’s musical voice to John Steinbeck’s saga, Ricky bends Steinbeck's saga to his own inimitable musical voice. The lustrous consonances and intermittent dissonances of his score hold Steinbeck’s characters in an adoring Gordon-ian embrace.
The penultimate high notes of the piece, sung by Mikaela Bennett with transfixing purity, brought me to tears. But so does the scene itself in the book, when Rose of Sharon puts aside the dead fetus of her stillborn child to suckle a starving stranger with her milk. It was unearthly how Ricky found the perfect notes for that transcendent moment of tragedy and beauty, and how Ms. Bennett simply eviscerated us, singing them.
The ovation lasted a long time.
Earlier, just before the concert commenced, Ricky had popped up from a seat down front and made his way up the aisle, receiving congratulations along the way. As he passed me, he glanced, paused with a hint of surprise, then sang out my name. I smiled. He smiled. And he moved on.