Barihunk Zachary Gordin has worn many hats in his operatic career, from teacher, coach, manager and, of course, singer. His latest endeavor will be as Artistic Director of Festival Opera in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The company was founded in 1991 by Arizona Opera co-founder Dr. Theodore Weis and has had a rich and occasionally rocky history, including the West Coast premiere of Ned Rorem's Our Town and a highly acclaimed Star Wars-themed production of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio.
Gordin's first season will include a fully staged production of Carlisle Floyd's American masterpiece Susannah. The opera will feature soprano Shana Blake Hill in the title role, tenor Alex Boyer as Sam, baritone Philip Skinner as Reverend Olin Blitch and baritone Eugene Brancoveanu as Elder McLean. Gordin has even imported German bass-baritone Malte Roesner for the role of Elder Ott. Roesner made his acclaimed 2017 American debut down the road with West Edge Opera in Vicente Martin y Soler's The Chastity Tree. This will be Roesner's debut with the company.
Malte Roesner
Gordin will kick off the season himself in a recital with his frequent collaborator Brian Nies on May 28. The duo will perform Schumann’s Dichterliebe, along with songs by Jake Heggie, Reynaldo Hahn,
and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The two released an album of Hahn songs in 2017 called “Amour sans
ailes,” which was was named Best Lieder
Recording of 2017 by Voix des Arts.
Gordin previously performed with the company as Angelotti in Puccini's Tosca, Escamillo in Bizet's Carmen, Enrico in Donizetti's Lucia di
Lammermoor, Germont in Verdi's La traviata and Joseph De Rocher in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man
Walking.
Tickets for the recital and Susannah are available ONLINE.
We've seen opera singers show up in all kinds of garb for rehearsals from turbans to yoga outfits, but few make quite the impression that barihunk Zachary Gordin makes. This photo was taken at the recent rehearsal for Festival Opera's "Make Our Garden Grow" benefit in Walnut Creek, California. Gordin is known for his flashy, flesh revealing outfits and occasional baubles, bangles...and bright, shiny beads.
A regular fixture on the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, where he started as a countertenor, Gordin has increasingly become a fixture in Southern California, as well. His next appearance will be on July 28th with the Pacific Shores Philharmonic at the Libbey Bowl in Ojai, California. Gordin will be reprising the baritone role in Orff's Carmina Burana, which he recently performed to critical acclaim with the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
All we have to say is: WOOF!!! We want to get invited to some rehearsals.
"Opera in the Park" is coming to the San Francisco/Oakland suburbs with barihunk Zachary Gordin, soprano Kristin Clayton and conductor Bryan Nies. On Sunday, June 24th, the singers will perform with Festival Opera at the Civic Park in Walnut Creek at 5 PM.
Zachary Gordin was most recently featured as a soloist in Oakland East Bay Symphony's Carmina Burana. He's been a regular on our site and was also featured in our charity calendar. On June 1st, at Sacramento's Pride celebration, he premiered composer Clint Borzoni's "A Nation
Announcing Itself" taken from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."
The "Opera in the Park" program will include music from Verdi's "Il Trovatore," Bizet's "Carmen," Bernstein's "West Side Story," Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," Puccini's "La boheme" and Bernstein's "Candide."
Attendees are encouraged to bring a picnic or buy pizza at the park. No alcoholic beverages are allowed, but you can get drunk on the music.
Beverly Wolff, Donald Gramm, Phylis Curtin and Ned Rorem, 1960's
Regular readers of this site know that we love to honor and celebrate the art of song. There have been few greater composers of American art song than Ned Rorem, who celebrates his 88th birthday today.
Rorem's catalog of art songs includes more than 500 works. "Evidence of Things Not Seen," his evening-length song cycle for four singers and piano, represents his magnum opus in the genre. The New York Festival of Song premiered the cycle at Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in January 1998. New York magazine called "Evidence of Things Not Seen" "one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs I have ever heard by any American composer;" Chamber Music magazine deemed it "a masterpiece."
Baritone Christopher DeVage sings "Dear, Though the Night" from Rorem's "Evidence of Things Not Seen":
Rorem's most recent opera, Our Town, which he completed with librettist Sandy McClatchy, is a setting of the acclaimed Thorton Wilder play of the same name. It premiered at the Indiana University Jacob's School of Music in February 2007 and has enjoyed subsequent performances with the Lake George Opera and Aspen Music Theater Center, North Carolina School of the Arts, Opera Boston, and Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, California.
His 80th birthday in 2003 resulted in a number of celebrations, including the Curtis Institute of Music's "Roremania," a two-week celebration encompassing works in every genre. The birthday season brought a trio of new concertos from Rorem: Cello Concerto, commissioned by the Residentie Orchestra and the Kansas City Orchestra for David Geringas; Flute Concerto, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra for its principal flutist Jeffrey Khaner; and Mallet Concerto, commissioned for Evelyn Glennie by the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Eos Orchestra.
His most recent publication, "Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings," chronicles Rorem's dark journey after the death of 32 year companion, Jim Holmes. In his diary, "Lies," Rorem said: "My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer's present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise. I don't believe that composers notate their moods, they don't tell the music where to go - it leads them....Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it - it's simple as that. Others may have more talent, more sense of duty. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need."
Baritone Donald Gramm sings Ned Rorem songs:
Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana on October 23, 1923. As a child he moved to Chicago with his family; by the age of ten his piano teacher had introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, an experience which "changed my life forever," according to the composer. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, two years later receiving a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He studied composition under Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, taking his B.A. in 1946 and his M.A. degree (along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition) in 1948. In New York he worked as Virgil Thomson's copyist in return for $20 a week and orchestration lessons. He studied on fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood in the summers of 1946 and 1947; in 1948 his song The Lordly Hudson was voted the best published song of that year by the Music Library Association.
In 1949 Rorem moved to France, and lived there until 1958. His years as a young composer among the leading figures of the artistic and social milieu of post-war Europe are absorbingly portrayed in "The Paris Diary" and "The New York Diary, 1951-1961."
