Narrowland Arts
at
The SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Presents
RICKY IAN GORDON
“BRIGHT EYED JOY”
Narrowland Arts at The Schoolhouse Center is pleased to announce the return of Ricky Ian Gordon for two evenings on Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21.
Both performances are at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $15 and may be reserved at 508.487.4800 X 101 or purchased at the door. Bright Eyed Joy is the name of Ricky Gordon’s recently released CD.
Composer Ricky Ian Gordon's songs have been widely recorded, but Bright Eyed Joy is the first disc devoted entirely to his music—spare, piano-driven works that blur the line between opera and art songs, peppered with jazz-flavored dissonant chords. Here, Gordon sets verse by such writers as Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to music, deftly using his arrangements to augment the poems' emotional impact rather than compete with the texts. Gordon's musical influences are evident: The sultry arrangement for Hughes' "Love Song for Lucinda"—performed by Audra McDonald and Darius deHaas—is reminiscent of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, while a wry interpretation of Parker's "Résumé" echoes Sondheim's flair for comic timing, which singers Judy Blazer and Chris Trakas exploit. Gordon is already esteemed by prominent performers, several of whom lend their voices to this disc; Bright Eyed Joy should make him a favorite with listeners, too.
Ricky Ian Gordon is a composer of unusual scope, equally at home writing for the concert hall, theater, opera, dance, and film. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1989 National Institute For Theater Award, the 1991 Stephen Sondheim Award, 1993 and 1994 Special Recognition Awards from the Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Music Theater Foundation, the 1999 Johnatahn Larson Foundation Award, and multiple
awards from ASCAP, meet The Composer, the American Music Center, and the National Endowment For The Arts. He is widely know as a composer of contemporary art songs, and for setting poems to music.
“He is not the most well-known American composer today, but does any colleague of Ricky Ian Gordon's share or surpass his skills at writing achingly beautiful music for the human voice and picking such apposite poetry to translate into song? Only Heaven, a revue including more than two dozen of his settings of Langston Hughes's poetry, suggested that the answer is no. Gordon's music -- melodic, intimate, with an inspired gift for bringing out the inner music of a given poem in unexpected ways -- has no trouble finding the sound of any kind of lyric, whether comic, romantic, enraged or ruminative. The sound is an intriguing mix of art song and show tune; it can be as delicate as a chanson and as broad as a Gershwin dance number. (Bernstein's and Weill's American works are, I suspect, Gordon's biggest influences.)
~PATRICK GILES
Throughout the past decade, Gordon’s reputation has grown steadily, thanks to a catalog that encompasses writing for concert hall, theater (Broadway’s The Wild Party), opera, and dance. Such diverse artists as Teresa Stratas, Harolyn Blackwell, Betty Buckley, and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus have performed and recorded his songs and song cycles. Even before many people knew Gordon’s music, they were familiar with his name—and his turbulent life growing up on Long Island, where he came out at 15—thanks to Donald Katz’s 1992 book, Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America.
To hear samples of Ricky Gordon’s music and commentary go to
http://www.behindthebeat.net/artist.asp?sid=1&ar=255&al=249 .
Narrowland Arts produces programs and events at the Schoolhouse Center, located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s historic East End Gallery District. For more information or an interview with the artist please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105.
