The CD of this album is available to purchase at ArkivMusic.

Bright Eyed Joy: The Songs of Ricky Ian Gordon is the first disc devoted entirely to the music of Ricky Ian Gordon, a composer equally at home writing for the concert hall, opera, dance, theater and film, and whose music, “with its references to Debussy, Ravel and Britten crossed with Bernstein, Blitzstein and Sondheim," says the New York Times, "has an unexpected emotional potency in light of its compositional rigor.” The songs on this new recording are set to texts by James Agee, Langston Hughes, W.S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Gordon, and feature such acclaimed vocalists as Audra McDonald, Dawn Upshaw, Adam Guettel, Judy Blazer, Theresa McCarthy, Chris Pedro Trakas and Darius de Haas, with orchestra conducted by Eric Stern.

The disc opens with “Heaven,” sung by Darius de Haas, a song Gordon had originally written to open Only Heaven, a musical celebration of Langston Hughes’s poetry through Harlem of the 1920s and '30s. The lyric is, according to the composer, “just one more wonderful Langston Hughes brush stroke—the simplest, most literal evocation of heaven imaginable.” Among the other Hughes settings included on the disc are “Dream Variations,” “Song for a Dark Girl,” and “Daybreak in Alabama,” all written for Audra McDonald and originally released on her Nonesuch debut, Way Back to Paradise.

On Bright Eyed Joy: The Songs of Ricky Ian Gordon, Gordon also sets the poetry of W.S. Merwin in “A Contemporary,” sung by Adam Guettel, as well as texts by the legendary Dorothy Parker, in whose memory Gordon composed the 1992 operetta Autumn Valentine. Gordon’s own text, in the song “Run Away,” recalls a particularly difficult time in the composer’s life. It is sung here by Theresa McCarthy, who premiered it during a cabaret appearance at New York’s Joe’s Pub in 1998.

A March 13, 2001, showcase performance of Gordon’s songs, featured vocalists Judy Blazer, Kristin Chenoweth, Adam Guettel, Cherry Jones, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Billy Porter, among others, was presented as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series.