Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alan Rich on the CD, September 11, 2008
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.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pleasantly Surprised, September 10, 2008
The recording is great! I was expecting the music to be super modern sounding but it's got a great colloquial feel to it with banjo and harmonica. There are even some jazzy parts. The singers are fantastic and the orchestra is fabulous!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stephen Eddin's All Music Guide Review, November 1, 2008
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
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~ Original Cast Recording
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by Ricky Ian Gordon 
