It's a pleasure to report that Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath deserves a place in the extremely tiny pantheon of successful American operas based on classic American novels. (Porgy and Bess, the granddaddy of American opera, and in a class by itself, is based on a minor novel, Dubose Heyward's Porgy, which would undoubtedly be forgotten today if it were not for the opera.) Gordon is obviously a theater composer -- he knows how to shape an ensemble, a scene, and an act to create a compellingly large narrative musical ...
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It's a pleasure to report that Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath deserves a place in the extremely tiny pantheon of successful American operas based on classic American novels. (Porgy and Bess, the granddaddy of American opera, and in a class by itself, is based on a minor novel, Dubose Heyward's Porgy, which would undoubtedly be forgotten today if it were not for the opera.) Gordon is obviously a theater composer -- he knows how to shape an ensemble, a scene, and an act to create a compellingly large narrative musical arc. The score is endlessly inventive, and there is more than enough attention-grabbing material to justify its length of more than three hours. The ensemble, "The Last Time There Was Rain," gives the opera a particularly powerful opening; it provides a harrowing context for the devastation of the drought that sets the story in motion. Gordon is not afraid of melody, and he generously draws on popular idioms of the time, including jazz, gospel, and Broadway. His sound is firmly...
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