Bright Eyed Joy: The Songs of Ricky Ian Gordon Ricky Rocks – Louise Harrison – Seattle, WA
I love the work of this composer and to have a whole CD of his imaginative songs makes every day I listen to it full of (as the title says) Bright Eyed Joy!
Stephen Holden’s NY Times Review of “Bright Eyed Joy” at Lincoln Center – E. Cameron – Pittsburgh, PA
March 15, 2001
CABARET REVIEW
Ricky Ian Gordon: Bursting With Effervescence, Skipping Among Genres
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
If the music of Ricky Ian Gordon had to be defined by a single quality, it would be the bursting effervescence infusing songs that blithely blur the lines between art song and the high-end Broadway music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.
A composer versed in the harmonic idiom of Samuel Barber and Benjamin Britten, Mr. Gordon also has a knack for witty theatrical pastiche. Many of his lighter songs pluck vintage theatrical echoes from their 1920’s and 30’s niches and dress them up with bold chord changes that catapult them in new directions.
Mr. Gordon’s music was the focus of the third and final season concert of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday evening. Befitting a musician whose songs defy category, the event brought nine singers — some from opera, others from Broadway — to the stage to perform more than two dozen numbers. While the majority were Mr. Gordon’s settings of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Jane Kenyon and others, six songs had words by the composer whose lyric style might be described as fancifully romantic.
Accompaniment was provided by a nine-member ensemble playing arrangements mostly by the composer. The concert was organized around five appearances by Cherry Jones to read poems, which were immediately followed by the composer’s elaborations. A musical extrovert who reveres his material, Mr. Gordon never tries to insert an opposing point of view. He takes the emotions of a poem at face value and sharpens and deepens them.
Lately, Mr. Gordon, along with Adam Guettel (who sang two numbers), Michael John La Chiusa, Jason Robert Brown and others, has been saddled with the role of potential artistic savior of the Broadway musical. But don’t expect an imminent coronation. As accessible as it is, Mr. Gordon’s music is sophisticated even by the standards laid out by Bernstein and Mr. Sondheim. It’s caviar for a world gorging on pizza.
With a couple of glaring exceptions, the casting of material to singer was impeccable, as was the ensemble playing under the direction of Ted Sperling. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson brought a quiet wisdom to settings of two Jane Kenyon poems, “Otherwise” and “Let Evening Come,” and Kristin Chenoweth brought a sassy verve to “Run Away” and “Just an Ordinary Guy.”
Monique McDonald and Camellia Johnson infused “Summer,” a gorgeous swatch of Sondheimesque impressionism, with a voluptuous warmth. Mr. Guettel’s tender reading of “We Will Always Walk Together,” a transcendent hymn to friendship from the 1996 musical “Dream True,” underscored its stature as an all-seasons ballad redolent of “Somewhere,” from “West Side Story,” via Schumann.
Ms. McDonald lifted “Stars,” a dreamy lullaby by Hughes, to the stratosphere. Two other Hughes poems, “Heaven” (sung by Billy Porter) and “Joy” (by the company) echoed the evening’s title, “Bright- Eyed Joy,” by hitting notes of pure exhilaration.
Following the American Songbook’s solid tribute to Arthur Schwartz, “Bright-Eyed Joy” was the latest encouraging sign that the troubled series has found its footing. In branching out beyond a musty hall-of-fame format, the concert also struck a positive blow for the future of American song.
Phenomenal! – Rosetta Sellers – Oak Park, IL
Ricky Ian Gordon is a very talented composer and poet, and the songs on “Bright Eyed Joy” display his magnificent gifts. There is not a contemporary composer who has his talent of fitting text to music, and the singers on this disc bring his compositions alive. Track 17, “Once I Was,” will make you weep!
A heavenly recording
Talented singers interpret the songs of Ricky Ian Gordon
Audra McDonald (left) and Darius de Haas flank composer Ricky Ian Gordon. (by Alice Arnold)
by Greg Varner
Seven talented singers lend their voices to Bright Eyed Joy (Nonesuch), a superb collection of songs by Ricky Ian Gordon. The composer himself provided text for two of these pieces; the others are his settings of poems by Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. S. Merwin, and James Agee.
Any gathering of singers that includes Audra McDonald, Dawn Upshaw, Darius de Haas, and Judy Blazer, among others, is something to celebrate; these are some of the most beautiful and distinctive voices you’ll hear anywhere. And they are matched to the material with uncanny precision. Who else but Dawn Upshaw could sing Gordon’s setting of Dorothy Parker’s “The Red Dress” so perfectly? The purity and classicism of Upshaw’s soprano make her a stellar interpreter of Parker’s lyric — especially in Gordon’s setting, which gives Parker’s lament a fullness and contemplative sweetness it lacks on the page. (This composer enhances and augments his texts with remarkable delicacy, never becoming intrusive or trampling on the poet’s original intent. Still, it would be interesting to hear a man sing “The Red Dress”!)
Judy Blazer’s jazzy delivery is just right for Gordon’s inspired meshing of three short verses by Parker, “Resumé,” “Wail,” and “Frustration.” This deathly cackle is reminiscent of Jacques Brel, and Blazer puts a wicked spin on lines like “Love has gone a-rocketing. That is not the worst; I could do without the thing and not be the first.” When she sings a zinger, Blazer simultaneously gives it more sting and more fun. Baritone Chris Pedro Trakas joins Blazer, singing of his frustration at not being able to murder his enemies while she bemoans the obverse, equally cruel fate that leaves one with no enemies at all. Gordon’s deft counterpoint of “Wail” and “Frustration” is wittily bookended by “Resumé,” a brief ode to frustrated suicidal impulses.
If choreographer Mark Morris’s work famously unites the sister arts of dance and music, then Gordon joins music with its other sister, poetry. He has composed literally hundreds of art songs as an act of homage to poems that move him. His work finds a home in the neutral territory between classical and theatrical music, sometimes speaking with one accent, sometimes with another.
The poet most often represented on this album is Langston Hughes. Audra McDonald, who recorded a handful of Gordon’s songs for her debut CD, Way Back to Paradise, is heard here on three of those previously released tracks, as well as on a handful of newly recorded works. In her hands, Gordon’s setting of Hughes’s “The Dream Keeper” is a song both of consolation and of mourning. The composer’s deft use of a sudden rise in pitch emphasizes the singer’s startled response to the “too-rough fingers of the world,” and McDonald’s bereft concluding cries are eloquent, though wordless. “Daybreak in Alabama,” also with text by Hughes, was a highlight of Way Back to Paradise; it remains a subversive gem, positing racial and sexual equality as attainable (and inextricably linked) ideals. Gordon’s beautiful melody and orchestration can make you weep even after repeated listening; “Daybreak” shimmers with hope and restrained passion.
McDonald is joined by the marvelous Darius de Haas, who played her brother in Broadway’s Marie Christine, for Hughes’s “Love Song for Lucinda,” rendered by Gordon as a jazz waltz. The text advises caution in the face of love’s blandishments; the singers easily capture its ambivalence. De Haas and McDonald, like the other performers on this record, are also skillful actors: Given Gordon’s sterling settings, they interpret these compelling texts for all they’re worth. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Wild Swans,” for instance, you feel Dawn Upshaw’s terror when she sings of being in a “house without air.”
With her achingly sweet soprano, Theresa McCarthy seems a natural choice for “Run Away,” a song Gordon wrote after a younger boyfriend left him reeling. The folksy, slightly forlorn quality of McCarthy’s voice is what made her so memorable as Nellie, the sister of the doomed miner in the musical Floyd Collins; on this disc, she also interprets other selections, including “Afternoon on a Hill.” In Gordon’s cascading melody, the exuberant descent anticipated by Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem is nicely emphasized.
With the voice of an openhearted choirboy, Adam Guettel brings an attractive “everyman” quality to his selections. (Guettel is also a talented composer; he wrote Floyd Collins.) He may be most effective here in W. S. Merwin’s “A Contemporary” — his unassuming warmth offsets the relative unfamiliarity of the music (Gordon gives the piece what sounds like an Asian accent) — and Merwin’s text is a little more abstract than some of Gordon’s other choices.
The album’s title comes from its finale, “Joy,” another short lyric by Hughes: “I went to look for Joy …[......], laughing Joy … And I found her driving the butcher’s cart in the arms of the butcher boy!” Whether or not Hughes meant this as a coded [......] reference, the suggestion clearly would not have been lost on Gordon, who has said that an important factor in his aesthetic is his sense of being different. (Growing up on Long Island, Gordon was taunted with [......].)
Darius de Haas gets the whole disc off to a promising start with yet another Hughes lyric, “Heaven.” His soaring performance sets the bar early, and the rest of the record is just as heavenly. This album is so good it’s a miracle. The only problem with Bright Eyed Joy is that it wasn’t made a double CD, so that listeners could enjoy more of Gordon’s beautiful work.
: Along with Michael John LaChiusa and Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon is one of the Young Turks of New York’s musical theater. Like them, Gordon shuns both the accessible pop of a David Yazbek and the bombast of a Frank Wildhorn, preferring instead to write post-Sondheimian art songs. The numbers here (with lyrics by Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, James Agee) span two decades. They are marvelously interpreted by the likes of Audra McDonald, Dawn Upshaw, Darius de Haas, and Judy Blazer. Blazer ambles through “Resumé/Wail/Frustration” with delicious jazz-age wit, while Upshaw once more proves that she’s a classical singer with an uncanny flair for the nonclassical repertoire. Note that anyone who’s expecting anything resembling a beat is advised to look elsewhere. –Elisabeth Vincentelli Bright Eyed Joy: The Songs of Ricky Ian Gordon
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