Finally, Proving Up exudes an attitude, present from time to time in the writing and the performances, that I find puzzling. I suppose it is intended as betrayal-of-promise irony, but it comes across almost as Schadenfreude, with the suggestion that the land-grant conditions themselves (which, in exchange for enough fertile real estate to live off for life, seem reasonable enough to me) were really sucker-bait items of state oppression. So long as we do not fail to honor the vision and courage involved, I am all for de-mythologizing the great westward expansion. But its dark underside is becoming a myth in its own right.

Ricky Ian Gordon: The Grapes of Wrath (libretto by Michael Korie, based on the novel by John Steinbeck). The Minnesota Opera, Grant Gershon, cond. PS Classics, PS-866.

Jump forward seventy years or so, and we’re pulling up stakes from Proving Up country (Oklahoma now, to be exact) and heading for California and our manifest destiny of steady work and a place to live that hasn’t gone barren. I wonder how many educated Americans under the age of fifty or sixty have actually read Steinbeck’s novel or even seen John Ford’s film. But there is an awareness that both are “iconic,” and quintessentially American. Thirty-seven years ago, Chicago’s Steppenwolf theatre company mounted an adaptation of the story that in 1990 came to Broadway, where it had a respectable run and won a Tony Award as best play. It was well acted, and adapted and directed by the formidable Frank Galati, but still, I felt, was only moderately effective—the novel is a tough beast to wrestle onto a stage. Eric Simonson, who was involved in the Steppenwolf production, served as dramaturg and director of the opera’s 2007 world premiere, and the recording was taken live from that run.

I chanced to see Gordon’s Intimate Apparel, with a libretto by Lynn Nottage, at the Lincoln Center Theatre (co-commissioned by that institution and the Met) a couple of years ago. “Production values” were modest, and I don’t remember anything much about the music, but thought the piece well performed and enjoyed it in a low-key way. Grapes, as we would adduce from its source material, is another feel-the-ordeal opera, but quite different from Mazzoli’s and two-and-a-half times as long. I had a miserable time listening to it. Its musical language is caught between post-musical-comedy usages and Modernist Lite ones, with orchestrations (shared by Gordon and Bruce Coughlin) in that upper-midrange, high brass-and-woodwind territory that nags at the ear—never a touch of depth or richness. The vocal writing, too, leaves classically inclined singers trying to shave their shaped vowels and vibratos down to awkwardly set lines of dialect (there’s no sense of accenting; of which syllables are short or long or where to sustain; of where the unpromising colloquial noises might lend themselves to actual musical phrasing), or else being released into blatantly ugly howling. Once in a while, Gordon gets an up-tempo passage going with some rhythmic drive, but it doesn’t often develop into anything satisfying. There are also places where he attempts emotionally pregnant lyrical writing (the scene of Ma and Tom Joad’s parting in Act 3 has affecting moments), but the melodic material isn’t compelling enough to make them tell. The numbers (forty-nine of them, though few could be called songs) segue into one another in a manner I can imagine is sometimes visually effective, but is musically less so—many of them end with the ba-DUMP-bump (or, usually, just the DUMP) of hoary musical theatre practice. In short, the score’s considerable ambition (Gordon even contrives a septet from the theme of one of his numbers—it wanders confusedly and at length) is betrayed by the poverty of its idiom.