Customer Reviews

My Life with Albertine

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My Life With Albertine
Exquisite. Gordon's contemplative score often recalls salon music of the 1920s. Piano notes fall like teardrops. Throbbing cello and violin lines suggest quickening of breath. A sensual 'Sometimes' and a yearning 'But What I Say' are highlights among the 16 songs and extensive underscoring given dark, gleaming orchestration by Bruce Coughlin.

Michael Sommers, The Star-Ledger

The melodies stick with you long afterwards...two unmistakable gems in 'Talk About the Weather' and Ms. O'Hara's wistful finale, 'If It Is True.'-

Jeremy McCarter, The New York Sun

The music swirls with regret, romance, and a sense of lost time.

Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Gordon writes beautiful music.
About a year ago the composer/lyricist's life intersected again with CMU's College of Fine Arts . The 1980 grad was there because his life had such significance that he received an alumnus award. Other theatre alums came too, Ted Danson and Rob Marshall. But you probably know Gordon's name less.
He's got major credits, especially for vocal music, operas, operettas and song collections involving such artists as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw and Audra McDonald. And he often gravitates to setting poetry.
Back in 2002 he wrote a musical featuring poetry by Langston Hughes, Only Heaven (likewise on ps classics.) It played way off-Broadway, Dayton , Ohio . Last year this show opened in New York 's actual off-Broadway but ran for less than a month. Thank goodness both scores can be heard by all of us. Each is worth the visit.
Again, as with Hughes, an eloquent word-artist is evoked, Marcel Proust. My Life with Albertine evokes his Albertine Disparue from 1925. Within the setting of Paris 1919, the score has the delicacy and grace you'd expect for the source, the period, the place. Impressions of Debussy, Satie and Poulenc waft through the gentle air. Fragrances of waltzes, polkas, schottisches come and go. So too do suggestions of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. Bien sur.
The 12 member cast includes Brent Carver, best known as multi-award winner for his role in Kander and Ebb's Kiss of the Spider Woman. Actually the cast outnumbers the instrumental ensemble's seven pieces. But the collective sound has the perfect, impeccable, discreet resonance that belongs with such a work.
Perhaps it was too fragile for sensation-seeking New York audiences. At home, if you listen by candlelight savoring wine and perhaps a madeleine, you'll savor many degrees of taste.

Gordon Spencer,Pittsburgh Magazine

Review by David Hurst

Last March, Playwrights Horizons took a bold chance with a small chamber musical called My Life With Albertine with book and lyrics by Richard Nelson and a score by Ricky Ian Gordon. Based on the Albertine sections of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, it was clearly going to be a hard sell and, indeed, it struggled to find an audience receiving mixed to negative reviews even though it boasted a stellar cast that included Brent Carver, Kelli O'Hara, Chad Kimball, Donna Lynne Champlin and Emily Skinner. Wisely, PS Classics preserved Gordon's lush and haunting score with the resulting recording revealing gorgeous melodies and astonishing singing. Granted, it's not a conventional musical and it takes a little work to fully invest yourself in Gordon's music but it's worth the effort and smaller, regional companies will undoubtedly stage their own productions thanks to PS Classics exceptional disc.