Ricky Ian Gordon

Ricky Ian Gordon, a composer whose principal focus rests on opera and an array of vocal forms that encompass musical theater, first established himself through songs conceived for Broadway stages. A considerable share of his output occupies the permeable divide separating classical idioms from popular song traditions.

Born May 15, 1956, in Oceanside, New York, Gordon grew up in a Long Island household whose postwar experiences furnished the material for the book Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America. He pursued studies at Carnegie Mellon University in piano, composition, and acting. After relocating to New York, he achieved an early breakthrough in 1992 with a group of ten songs setting poems by Langston Hughes, created for soprano Harolyn Blackwell; several of these appeared on Audra McDonald’s 1998 album Way Back to Paradise. In 2000 he wrote the song Night Flight to San Francisco, drawn from a monologue in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, for soprano Renée Fleming. The death of his partner from AIDS prompted the song cycle Green Sneakers for baritone, empty chair, and piano (2007); Gordon subsequently arranged the piece for soprano and orchestra, a version first presented by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra. Additional prominent interpreters of his music include Dawn Upshaw, Denyce Graves, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

From the early 2000s onward Gordon has concentrated much of his creative energy on large-scale works whose subjects and stylistic approaches have proved both successful and varied. The 2003 musical A Life with Albertine drew on the life of writer Marcel Proust. Two years later came the musical Orpheus and Euridice, which received a 2007 recording on the Ghostlight label. His 2007 opera The Grapes of Wrath, adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel, represented a significant career milestone; introduced by the Minnesota Opera, the four-hour score enjoyed numerous performances and later existed in a two-act reduction. Further operas comprise Sycamore Trees (2010), for which he supplied his own libretto concerning a suburban family, and 27 (2014), centered on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris. Morning Star, depicting a Russian Jewish family in New York, reached the stage through the Cincinnati Opera in 2015, while The House Without a Christmas Tree, commissioned and first performed by the Houston Grand Opera, followed in 2017.

Institutions such as Yale University, the Juilliard School, and the University of Michigan have regularly engaged him as a visiting professor. The 2019 opera Ellen West examined the actual circumstances of a woman confined to a Swiss hospital with an eating disorder; the work was subsequently recorded with Gordon serving as producer. Among other recorded scores stands his 2011 Civil War song cycle Rappahannock County. He has also released the album Bric-a-Brac: Ricky Ian Gordon Sings Ricky Ian Gordon. Early in 2022 his opera The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, derived from Giorgio Bassani’s novel set during the fascist period in Italy, received its New York premiere.