YOUR CLEAR EYE

Released October 26th, 2018

The debut album from Jennifer Zetlan (soprano) in collaboration with composer and pianist Ricky Ian Gordon

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Three track Maxi-single streaming preview:

About Your Clear Eye:

When award-winning composer Ricky Ian Gordon heard Jennifer Zetlan, he knew he had found something special. After working on his Opera Morning Star together, the deal was sealed. They simply had to record an album together. That album is Your Clear Eye, an album that means to move the listener towards innocence with a sense that what was soiled can be made right, through honesty, through dreams, through the impulse to serve, through the fires of grief and through one's own fallibility...

Renowned soprano, Jennifer Zetlan - with the support of the composer behind the keyboard - embodies Kushner (Harper’s monologues from “Angels in America”) Dickinson, and Plath on an album of never before recorded works by Ricky Ian Gordon.

Track list:

1. Antarctica (from Angels in America by Tony Kushner)
2. Too few the mornings be (poetry by emily dickinson)
3. If all the griefs
4. The bustle in a house
5. Letter to the world
6. You cannot put a fire out
7. Bee! I’m expecting you
8. Poor Little Heart
9. I’m nobody
10. How happy is the little stone
11. Estranged from beauty
12. Will there really be a morning?
13. Night flight to San Francisco (from Angels in America by Tony Kushner)
14. Child poetry (by Sylvia Path)

About the artists:

Jennifer

Soprano Jennifer Zetlan is internationally recognized for her artistry and captivating stage presence. She has been seen and heard on opera and concert stages worldwide, as well as recital venues and on Broadway. In the current season, Ms. Zetlan performs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Museum of Natural History, reprising her role in Matt Aucoin’s Crossing with American Repertory Theatre, creating the title role of Rhoda in John Musto’s Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt for On Site Opera, and reprising her role as Fanny in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Morning Star.

Known for her passion for contemporary music, Ms. Zetlan has been featured in the premieres of numerous American operas, including Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (The Metropolitan Opera) and Dark Sisters (Opera Company of Philadelphia and Gotham Chamber Opera), Steven Stucky and Jeremy Denk’s opera The Classical Style (Carnegie Hall and the Ojai Festival), Daron Hagen’s Amelia (Seattle Opera), Ned Rorem’s Our Town (Aspen Music Festival and Juilliard Opera Center; Western US and NYC premieres), Matt Aucoin’s Crossing (American Repertory Theatre), Ricky Ian Gordon’s Morning Star (Cincinnati Opera), Louis Karchin’s Jane Eyre, and arias from David Diamond’s The Noblest Game (Seattle Symphony). Other contemporary works she has performed include Henry Purcell and Kaija Saariaho’s The Tempest Songbook (Gotham Chamber Opera), György Ligeti’s Requiem (American Symphony Orchestra), Osvaldo Golijov’s 3 Songs for Soprano (Lexington Philharmonic), John Tavener’s Requiem (Sacred Music in a Sacred Space at St. Ignatius Loyola), David Hertzberg’s Nympharum, (Juilliard Orchestra) and Richard Ayres’ In The Alps (Alarm Will Sound), for which her last minute substitution was described as “flawless” by the New York Times.

Ricky

Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1956 in Oceanside, NY) studied piano, composition and acting, at Carnegie Mellon University. After moving to New York City, he quickly emerged as a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr. Gordon's songs have been performed and or recorded by such internationally renowned singers as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Nathan Gunn, Judy Collins, Nadine Sierra, Kelli O'Hara, Audra MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Nicole Cabell, Frederica Von Stade, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell, Betty Buckley, and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, among many others.

Ricky Ian Gordon’s most recent premieres include The House Without A Christmas Tree(2017, libretto by Royce Vavrek, commissioned and premiered by Houston Grand Opera) a holiday opera for young audiences that The Wall Street Journal describes as “a charming, family-friendly piece,” and a reduction of The Grapes of Wrath (2017 two-act version commissioned and premiered by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis) which the Chicago Tribune calls “a great American opera.”

Credits:

Executive Producer: Louis Levitt
Produced by William Hobbs, Andrew Bove, Louis Levitt, Paula Mlyn
Engineered, Mixed, and Mastered by Andrew Bove
Edited by Andrew Bove and Mario Correa
Assistant Engineer: Doug Bove
Album cover art & design: Michael Muscarella
Photo credit: Fay Fox
Recorded 2018 at Gene & Shelley Enlow Recital Hall at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.

PRESS

Recent Press

“There are few musical collaborations as direct and purely distilled as those between a singer and a composer. And when a distinctive compositional aesthetic is matched by a musician whose voice and skills can articulate the music's best qualities, it can be magic. On her first album, Your Clear Eye, soprano Jennifer Zetlan comes close to that transcendence in her interpretations of songs by composer Ricky Ian Gordon.”

“Gordon picked the right singer for this recording and the two mesh perfectly. Zetlan’s singing is beautiful and she has exceptionally clear enunciation. (The liner notes have all the texts.) She also burrows into the changing mood of each piece in an outstanding debut recording for the singer.”