PS CLASSICS, the label dedicated to the heritage of Broadway and American Popular Song, will release the original cast recording of Ricky Ian Gordon’s acclaimed autobiographical musical Sycamore Trees at all digital and streaming sites on Friday, August 30. A special limited edition of 250 CDs will follow on Friday, September 20. Released on the heels of Gordon’s acclaimed memoirs, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, the album – featuring Broadway veterans Farah Alvin, Marc Kudisch, Judy Kuhn, Jessica Molaskey, Matthew Risch, Diane Sutherland, and Tony Yazbeck – offers Gordon’s musical and dramatic take on his tumultuous upbringing and early adulthood. The album is currently available for preorder at Amazon, and sound clips can be heard at the PS Classics website.

Sycamore Trees premiered in 2010 at Virginia’s Signature Theatre, winning multiple Helen Hayes awards, including the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical, but no studio recording was made at the time. Fortunately, original sound designer Matt Rowe recorded excerpts from a performance for archival purposes; now, enormous advances in audio technology – and the willingness of members of the original cast to come briefly into the studio some 14 years later to fill in gaps that lay unrecorded – have allowed that “board mix” to be transformed into a genuine cast album: one that reflects both the spontaneity and suppleness of a live performance and the precision and expansiveness of a studio mix. Sycamore Trees is the fifth recording of Gordon’s work to be released by PS Classics, following the opera The Grapes of Wrath, the musicals My Life with Albertine and Dream True and the song cycle Only Heaven.

The orchestrations are by Tony Award–winner Bruce Coughlin; Fred Lassen conducts the eight-piece orchestra, with Andrew Resnick at the piano. The original production was directed by Tina Landau, and featured a book by Gordon and Nina Mankin. The new album was produced by Tommy Krasker and Bart Migal, with audio restoration by Migal, and was made possible by the support and generosity of the Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund, with additional funding provided by So-Chung Shinn.

Gordon comments: “Having this original cast recording being born into the world 14 years after its premiere is like getting the best birthday present of all time. It was so far away from anything I ever thought possible, this incredible cast, these amazing players. My gratitude for all that has been done to make this happen – to everyone who said yes, to everyone who supported it, to all who worked on it, and, of course, to my lifelong friend Tommy Krasker – is infinite, immeasurable.”

Tommy Krasker, co-founder of PS Classics, comments: “Philip [Chaffin, co-founder of PS Classics] and I were fortunate to see a performance of Sycamore Trees in 2010. We wanted to record it then, but it was such a crazy time for us: we were doing live albums with Kate Baldwin and the Callaway Sisters, and we had already committed to recording A Minister’s Wife and Death Takes a Holiday off-Broadway. We just couldn’t manage it. Over the years, Ricky and I lamented the fact that we’d been unable to produce an original cast album – especially with that amazing group of actors. But this year, when plans for Ricky’s autobiography started to materialize, he asked me to take another listen to the Sycamore Trees live recording and see if anything could be done. Needless to say, audio technology has advanced dramatically in the last 15 years – the last few years, especially. Fifteen years ago, if you had a “board mix” of a musical – a recording never intended for public consumption – all you could do with it was stamp “recorded live” on the packaging, and hope the listener excused the noises, the glitches, the cavernous theatre sound, the laughter that covered key lyrics. But now, new technology enabled us to remix and refine it: to take these glorious performances and orchestrations and give them a real studio sheen. I won’t pretend it sounds exactly as it would have if we had recorded in the studio – but for technology this new, I was amazed how close we were able to get. The audio restoration was spearheaded by my co-producer Bart Migal, and as he does on every recording we do together, he made magic. Sycamore Trees is such an important work, I’m glad we finally had the opportunity to release a proper recording of it.” 

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Ricky Ian Gordon is a New York based composer and writer whose works have been performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and all over the USA and Europe. As a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater, Gordon’s songs have been performed and recorded by such renowned singers as Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Nathan Gunn, Nicole Cabell, the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Frederica Von Stade. His operas include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (New York City Opera/Yiddish Folksbiene, lib. Michael Korie); Intimate Apparel (Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater, lib. Lynn Nottage); Ellen West (Beth Morrison Projects, Opera Saratoga, lib. Frank Bidart); The House Without a Christmas Tree (Houston Grand Opera), 27 (Opera Theatre of St Louis, lib. Royce Vavrek); Morning Star (Cincinnati Opera, lib. William Hoffman); A Coffin in Egypt (Houston Grand Opera, lib. Leonard Foglia); Rappahannock County (Virginia Opera, lib. Mark Campbell); Green Sneakers (Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival and Lincoln Center, lib. Ricky Ian Gordon); The Grapes of Wrath (Minnesota Opera, lib. Michael Korie); The Tibetan Book of The Dead (Houston Grand Opera, lib. Jean Claude Van Itallie); and Orpheus and Euridice (Lincoln Center, lib. Ricky Ian Gordon, Obie Award). Musicals include Sycamore Trees (Signature Theatre, playwright Nina Mankin, Helen Hayes Award); My Life with Albertine (Playwrights Horizons, playwright Richard Nelson, AT&T Award, Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Music Theater Foundation Award); and Dream True (Vineyard Theatre, playwright Tina Landau, Richard Rodgers Award). Upcoming works include the opera This House (librettists Lynn Nottage and Ruby Gerber). As a teacher, Gordon has taught both master classes and composition classes in colleges and universities throughout the country, including Yale, NYU, Northwestern, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, and more. His honors include an Obie Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, the 2003 Alumni Merit Award for exceptional achievement and leadership from Carnegie Mellon University, a Shen Family Foundation Award, the Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Theater Foundation Award, the Constance Klinsky Award, and many awards from ASCAP. Gordon’s memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera, has just been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and is available as an audiobook as well. www.rickyiangordon.com

PS CLASSICS, founded in 2000 by Tommy Krasker and Philip Chaffin, is a nine-time Grammy Award nominee for its cast albums of Assassins, Nine: The Musical, Grey Gardens, Company, A Little Night Music, Sondheim on Sondheim, Follies, Porgy and Bess and Fun Home. The label’s catalog also includes solo albums by such artists as Anthony Rapp, Cheyenne Jackson, Victoria Clark, Steven Pasquale and Stephanie J. Block; and restorations of long-lost musicals, including George Gershwin’s Sweet Little Devil, Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys and Vernon Duke’s Sweet Bye and Bye. Recent releases include Jeff Harnar Sings Sammy Cahn: The Second Time Around, the soundtrack to the film Glitter & Doom, Maury Yeston’s December Songs for Voice and Orchestra and an all-star tribute to an underappreciated composer, Parting Gift: the songs of Gerald Ginsburg. Selections from the label’s acclaimed New Broadway Cast Recording of On the Town are featured in the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. www.psclassics.com

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Sycamore Trees – Track Listing 

1. Let There Be Light
2. Ours
3. The Last Time I Saw Him
4. Sycamore Trees
5. Pigeons
6. Poem
7. “Haunted, a poem”
8. “The dinner table”
9. My Mother Is a Singer
10. I Gotta Get Outta Here
11. Maybe a Work of Art
12. I Don’t Know What to Write
13. I Don’t Know What to Write/I’ll Get Clean
14. Two Men
15. Father’s Song
16. Self-Help
17. Watercolor
18. Healing
19. Far Away