Biography

Composer Ricky Ian Gordon focuses on opera and other vocal genres, including musical theater. He began his career as a composer of Broadway-oriented songs, and much of his work exists close to the line between classical music and popular song. Gordon was born on May 15, 1956, in Oceanside, New York. His family life on Long Island was the subject of the book Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America. Gordon attended Carnegie Mellon University, studying piano, composition, and acting. Moving to New York, he had an early breakthrough with a set of ten songs on poems by Langston Hughes, written in 1992 for soprano Harolyn Blackwell; some of those songs were recorded by Audra McDonald in 1998 on her album Way Back to Paradise. Gordon's 2000 song Night Flight to San Francisco, setting a monologue from Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, was written for soprano Renée Fleming. Gordon's partner died of AIDS, a tragedy that inspired the song cycle Green Sneakers for baritone, empty chair, and piano (2007); he later rescored the work for soprano and orchestra, in which form it was premiered by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. Other major singers who have performed Gordon's works include Dawn Upshaw, Denyce Graves, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Since the early 2000s, much of Gordon's energy has been devoted works in larger forms, which have been both successful and diverse in subject and musical style. His 2003 musical A Life with Albertine was based on the life of writer Marcel Proust. That was followed in 2005 by another musical, Orpheus and Euridice, recorded in 2007 on the Ghostlight label. Gordon's 2007 opera The Grapes of Wrath, based on the novel by John Steinbeck, marked a major advance in his career; premiered by the Minnesota Opera, the work was widely performed. The four-hour work later appeared in a two-act version. Other Gordon operas include Sycamore Trees (2010), set to his own libretto about a suburban family, and 27 (2014), about the life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris. Gordon's opera Morning Star, about a Russian Jewish family in New York, was premiered by the Cincinnati Opera in 2015, and The House Without a Christmas Tree, commissioned and premiered by the Houston Grand Opera, followed in 2017. Gordon has been in demand as a visiting professor at such institutions as Yale University, the Juilliard School, and the University of Michigan. Gordon's opera Ellen West (2019) dealt with the real-life story of a woman in a Swiss hospital with an eating disorder; the opera was recorded, with Gordon as producer. Several other Gordon works have been recorded, including his 2011 Civil War song cycle Rappahannock County. He has issued an album of his own songs, Bric-a-Brac: Ricky Ian Gordon Sings Ricky Ian Gordon. Gordon's opera The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, based on a novel by Giorgio Bassani about the fascist era in Italy, had its premiere in New York in early 2022. ~ James Manheim, Rovi